CAMPAIGNS 

i/Ind Intervals 
By JEAN GIRAUDOUX 




Class 

Book 

fopyrigM 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



CAMPAIGNS AND INTERVALS 



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The Library of Congress 



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* 



Campaigns and 
Intervals 



By 

Lieut. Jean Giraudoux 

Translated by 
Elizabeth S. Sergeant 




Boston and New York 
Houghton Mifflin Company 

The Riverside Press Cambridge 
1918 



38 



J31 64 



COPYRIGHT, X918, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published January iqi8 



/ rTO 

FEB "4 i3!8 

©CI.A492161 

l\jiV J 



A 

ANDRE DU FRESNOIS 

DISPARU 



CONTENTS 

Dedication 
I. The First War 

I. In Alsace 3 

II. The First Battle 11 

III. War is Long 27 

IV. A Triumphal Departure 49 

Portuguese Days 69 

II. The Grand Tour 

I. From the Vosges to Belgium... 85 

II. War Currents on the Highroad 104 

III. Vigil near Paris 116 

IV. First Dead 130 

The Dardanelles 155 

III. Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

I. Sunday 171 

II. Monday 186 

III. Tuesday 205 

IV. Wednesday 216 

V. Thursday 236 

May on Lake Asquam 259 



The First War 



The First War 

i 

IN ALSACE 

Bellemagny, August 17, IQI4. 
Beyond the frontier at last! Yet, as we wake to 
find ourselves stretched out in our cramped hay- 
loft, it is an effort to remember that Alsace lies 
asleep close by — remember it and feel glad of it. 
Our bodies are weary, our minds dusky — then, 
all at once, the thought that the regiment has 
really started strikes home. Up we leap, half 
dressed, strange beings rising swift as resurrected 
creatures out of the hay about us, bemoaning 
the stiffness of arms and legs and backs. The 
straws have left red marks on our hands and 
our sore cheeks, and we shall look till night as 
if we had slept between the Tertiary and the 
Quaternary periods. 

. . . Six o'clock. We join the telephone oper- 
ators in the convent garden. We are in reserve 
to-day, and the convoy is streaming past us. 
.... 3 .... 



The First War 

All the vehicles still have their own paint and their 
own signs. Motor-buses from the Alpine route 
come rumbling along, some from Chamounix, 
some from the Grande Chartreuse, — we point 
these out to the lay Sister, — some from Grenoble. 
A tourists' crusade, it seems, that has started off 
on the spur of the moment for a newly discov- 
ered magic country, and been joined on the road 
by the omnibuses of the towns through which it 
has jaunted: the White Horse from Pontarlier, 
the Cuckoo from Noyon, red and black bourgeois 
creatures, yet incapable of resisting such a fasci- 
nating adventure; the only ones that kick about it 
are the horses from Forcalquier, which find the 
station even farther off than usual. 

Eight o'clock — ten o'clock — noon. The only 
refuge from time is to count it in two-hour 
watches, as do sentinels and naval officers. The 
soldiers are lounging about on the ground, de- 
stroying everything that they can lay eyes or 
hands on in their immediate vicinity — collecting 
piles of stones, carving their names on the roots of 
trees; indeed, they are fairly wallowing in the 
meadows, like the horses which have pawed up the 
grass and sunk in to their knees. Two o'clock — 
the corporal telephone operator has his nose in 
.... 4 .... 



In Alsace 

a series of little green-and-white volumes. I fall 
upon them when a break in the connection takes 
him away, or a horse gets tangled in the wire, but 
he reads them with prodigious speed, and I never 
find the same one twice. 

Suddenly I myself am called to the telephone. 

"Come along," says an unknown voice. 

"With my gun?" 

"Come along." 

It's the Nineteenth company speaking, and 
very slowly I follow the telephone wire which 
brings me to its post. This is the only way not to 
get lost, for everything that does not come over 
the wire comes alongside it; the operator receives, 
with equal hospitality, canned goods, munitions, 
and men who are being shifted. A whole store- 
house is piled up beside him now, and the disen- 
tangled horse is there, too, surrounded by a group 
that is trying to make him neigh into the mouth- 
piece. But he thinks it is a phonograph, and re- 
fuses to compromise himself. 

It's a lieutenant who is asking for me. In the 
days when he was studying for his licence, he 
knew my classmates at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, 
and wants to talk about them. Since the war 
had to come he congratulates himself on having 
.... 5 .... 



The First War 

taken his degree in history. . . . Evening falls 
as we gossip on, and a round moon rises above 
the horizon like a great pewter platter. The 
Angelus is pealing in some village that our army 
has not yet reached — our first care is to cut the 
bell-ropes in all the church-towers. The after- 
glow of the sunset, the sea-wind, too, come to us 
to-night from the east, from the Rhine. It is a 
soft evening when one may almost believe — by 
letting mere chance dominate probabilities — 
that there will be no dead during the war. We 
talk, the lieutenant and I, not without harshness, 
of the peace that till now has been our only 
source of danger, and of the two or three common 
friends whom it has killed: there was Revel — he 
died suddenly in the tramway in his best frock 
coat, like the regular civilian he was; and 
Manchet — it was at Mayence he met his end, a 
prisoner, even in those days, of a German pro- 
fessor who had presented him to Baedeker's 
daughter. Then we talk lightly of the living: of 
Besnard, with his absurd translations, of the 
three Dournelle brothers, so carefully separated 
in the classroom, and yet so oddly successful in 
getting the same grade in their Latin themes. 
Like all the other Frenchmen of this month of 
.... 6 .... 



In Alsace 

August, 1914, who thought to satisfy the war by 
sacrificing to it in their heart of hearts the hypo- 
crites and knaves of their acquaintance, we feel — 
though not without a pang of pity — that the 
cheats and dunces must surely be exposed to 
death. But the Greek professors, the Fellows at 
Upsal, the literary aspirants engaged to the 
daughters of famous scientists, seem to us in- 
vulnerable. How could we possibly guess that 
Besnard had already been killed? Or that the 
Dournelles, as they started one after the other for 
Lorraine, would all three be swallowed up within 
a few weeks of each other, like well-diggers suc- 
cessively asphyxiated in trying to rescue a com- 
rade? Could we believe that even Saint-Arn6 — 
the chap who fought a duel with a druggist — was 
dead already? The lieutenant sends him a post- 
card on which we inquire whether his head is 
still on his shoulders. . . . Like our soldiers, we 
were still at the point where you tease a comrade 
by putting his cap on the freshest grave in the 
cemetery. 

Quarter to five — ten minutes to five. Toward 

meal-times, hours should be nearer together. I 

leave the lieutenant of the historical degree, and 

go back to the convent. But they send us up to 

.... 7 .... 



The First War 

sleep in the schoolhouse, while the company from 
the schoolhouse comes down to sleep in the con- 
vent. They don't want us to get fixed habits, and 
are suspicious of both God and the schoolmaster. 

Burnhaupt, August 18, 
At five o'clock the regiment is off again in the 
direction of Mulhouse. After this fortnight far 
from towns and cities every shop-window in the 
places we pass through attracts us, as if the 
bread, wine, and chocolate set out so temptingly 
were a feast offered us by the tradespeople. 
When we finally halt, our toilets and our gossip 
with the citizens are interrupted by the bom- 
bardment of Upper Burnhaupt, whose church- 
tower reels and falls in ruins. That of Lower 
Burnhaupt, seen through the shrubbery, now 
looks a few inches taller than before. 

We are beginning to be tired of fighting all by 
ourselves. Impossible to root out a German. In 
the trenches at Saint-Cosme and Bretten there 
are no signs of anything but Gemiitlichkeit, — of 
the Baden, or Munich, or Saxon variety according 
to the regiment, — a harmonica, some verses from 
Goethe printed across a bunch of violets at the 
bottom of a post-card; just such a pacific collec- 
.... 8 .».. 



In Alsace 

tion as one finds in the Maillot subway on race- 
nights. No helmets, no sabers, but a valise and a" 
catalogue of electric apparatus. On some dress- 
ings that have been thrown away a few drops of 
pale blood — the blood of a hospital patient, the 
blood of a race that remains civilian under arms, 
whose life, and hunger, and thirst are not purified 
by war. Already I feel the injustice of making 
soldiers fight against this mass of civilians. A use- 
less war, it seems, where, under the name of Blue 
Light Horse, and White Hussars, — but always 
in the same greenish coat, — we shall capture 
waiters, and painters from Dresden with square 
eyeballs, who are doubtless already cutting their 
French sentinel into cubes. 

The air is thin. There had been a sort of vac- 
uum here just before we came: a few corpses — 
those of the Germans who could not live without 
breathing. The rest of them have had time to 
change their nationality in the cellars and barns 
of the villages. Some people arisen from a half 
sleep talk with us in a half French. The dozen 
hostages are ready: there are even thirteen. The 
servants are all trained to war, and the child that 
cries at the noise of the cannon is slapped. It is 
only the furniture, with its scrawled inscriptions, 
.... 9 .... 



The First War 

that tries to escape by declaring its identity. "I 
am the sideboard, comrade"; "I am the fragile 
glass where more than one heart has poured out its 
tears." Doting cushions talk madly of dawn and 
love, and on the fronts of craven pieces of furni- 
ture denunciations in German script make their 
appearance: "My masters are hidden inside 
me." But they aren't there! From France alone 
comes the proof of their existence. Lieutenant 
Souchier has heard from his wife that forty-two 
prisoners are being aired in Roanne! Not a child 
or a paralyzed old woman on the road to Charlieu 
but has already counted them to see that the 
number is complete. 



II 

THE FIRST BATTLE 

Enschingen, August iq. 
A long march in the fog. The three or four men 
of the regiment who had provided themselves 
with waterproof capes at Roanne declare that 
they would prefer a good shower. We see nothing 
from the road but what you can see from a trench: 
a slope, a parapet. But the cannonading becomes 
so violent that the fog lifts — instead of bringing 
rain, these cannon have continued to take after 
the rustic guns of Burgundy and Touraine, which 
drive off thunder and hail from the vineyards. 
Since Bellemagny my comrades have known how 
to read and recognize the word "Schule" and in 
every village their sole interest is the schoolhouse; 
indeed, at Lower Burnhaupt the nice question 
arises as to whether the seven children in the 
courtyard, who look exactly alike, are the school- 
master's sons or his pupils. Devaux, who can 
read only the word "Kloster" convent, looks for 
it on every house-front. War has n't yet destroyed 
" .... u .... 



The First War 

the real houses hereabouts, but all their replicas 
in miniature, like letter-boxes and dove-cotes, 
have felt its hand, and a German doll, a Schutz- 
mann, is hung to a gable. Soon there will be 
nothing to be seen that is not soldier-size, and, 
once the children are killed, it will be our turn. 

No scattered farms — nothing but small towns 
made up of the most dissimilar houses, to which 
their straggling growth of geraniums gives a cer- 
tain uniformity; each of them, as the peasants 
among us recognize by imperceptible signs, must 
correspond to one of those meadows, fields, and 
orchards that mingle in the plain. The church 
weathercocks amuse themselves by leaning over 
as far as they can without having to open their 
wings. Rather a dull landscape, for the sad shades 
of the gayest colors prevail : yellow ochre for roofs 
and tiles, dark green for meadows and leaves — 
even the grass has an air of immortality. Only the 
Vosges, on our left, are transparent. We march 
on till night and, as the wind changes, so the 
battle seems to change its direction sharply, like 
a hunt. I have Frobart for a neighbor; he comes 
from the same little town as myself and talks to 
me, as usual, of the quarrel between the Larostes 
and the Ferlands. The Larostes, he says, no 
.... I2 ... 



The First Battle 

longer bow to the Ferlands, and yet — here 's the 
riddle — M. Ferland senior keeps on bowing to 
young Mme. Laroste. 

At five o'clock, a sudden stop. Ten minutes, a 
quarter of an hour, pass. We make a great fuss, 
but the road is not clear. A near-sighted captain 
of the general staff arrives at a gallop, asks for the 
colonel, and looks for him in my squad. So I show 
him about and learn that fighting is in progress 
in the direction of Flaxlanden, southeast of Mul- 
house; that four companies are to advance, four 
remaining in reserve; and that ours, the Twenti- 
eth, will be one of those to march. Then I go 
back to Frobart, who wants to hear all about it. 

"What battle is it we're to fight? " he asks. 

"The battle of Flaxlanden." 

He finds the name of his battle not at all easy 
to pronounce; he wants to know, too, if it is a 
skirmish or a real battle, and if they're fighting in 
the village itself, or in the neighboring region. I 
can enlighten him on one point: it is surely a 
battle. From the interstices of the convoy pour 
out colonels with brassards who are thinking of 
their sons at Saint-Cyr, and keeping an anxious 
eye out for wheel-grease; and hard on their 
heels comes that lieutenant in gray-green — the 
.... I3 .... 



The First War 

division paymaster — whom the whole French 
army has taken for a rifleman all through Au- 
gust. The commissariat trucks are hastening to 
the rear in a thoroughly undignified manner. In 
the company, too, wild confusion. We are like 
a mob of actors on whom the curtain has risen 
one minute too soon; we suddenly realize that we 
none of us know our places in the fray. Sergeant- 
majors dig theories out of their knapsacks. The 
drummers and buglers come and attach them- 
selves to each company in turn, with the air of 
giving it a present, and are sent off again to the 
next company, with abusive language. The ser- 
geant-majors order us to hang our identification 
disks around our necks, on the pretext that they 
are a protection to the chest, and that our arms 
might be blown off; and they number the men in 
each squad in series, so that we may know who 
is in command, in case the leader is wounded. 
Frobart has no chance of commanding unless he 
is left quite by himself, and Artaud will have 
only Frobart under his orders. 

Our canteens are filled with water, in spite of 

the protests of those who were hoarding a little 

pure absinthe or rum. Only the stretcher-bearers 

are ready: in fact, they have already started; we 

.... I4 .... 



77^ First Battle 

have to stop them forcibly and make them take 
their places in the ranks. . . . We lacked two hours 
of being really ready for war. But all the same 
they give us twenty minutes to pull off dangling 
buttons, harness the dogs to their carts, and make 
everything fast to the regiment that may be 
hanging loose; to pick up papers, and bring our 
bivouac to a high state of cleanliness and polish — 
as if we were going to fight right here, or were 
expecting a storm. No danger of our slipping or 
falling. The good faith of the regiment is restored; 
the men who have stowed their packs away in 
the trucks, with the connivance of the drivers, run 
to fetch them; the company vehicles hand out 
alcohol to the ambulances; the machine-gunners 
replace the cardboard filling of their cartridge- 
drums with real ammunition. It's not long before 
every man has his exact battle-weight — you 
might put every one of them on the scales, as 
shells are weighed at the factory. All those who 
lacked canteens, or third cartridge-belts, or trigger- 
plugs, suddenly discover a collection near by, and 
a cap even turns up for Artaud, our guide, who 
has been bareheaded since Roanne. It is a red 
cap, without a cover, a very conspicuous one, but 
Artaud scoffs at the idea of being picked out by 
.... I5 .... 



The First War 

the enemy. Has n't he already a white horse, and 
the flags of all the Allies painted on his cart? 
Tonking's emblem is n't even dry. 

The order comes. We start off in the direction 
of Bern wilier. 

When we get there we march through at double- 
quick. So many troops must have been passing 
through during the day that nobody is at the doors 
to watch this regiment running to battle. Yet we 
should have liked to ask how many kilometres it 
is to Flaxlanden. Two policemen threaten one of 
our men, who has robbed a plum-tree as he went 
along. A sutler, shaving on the sidewalk before a 
mirror hung to a cherry-tree, waits nervously, his 
face all dripping with lather, till we have stopped 
shaking his road. On the path of these thousand 
men who have been suddenly sucked in to fill a 
vacuum, only such inhuman beings as are con- 
cerned to prevent them from bird's-nesting, or 
stealing chickens, or fishing for crawfish that are 
under size. We emerge from the village into a 
straight highway, empty and silent. Nobody re- 
turning from battle, either. We should be glad 
enough to see a cyclist coming, or a postal ser- 
geant — anybody, even a civilian, or a woman 
would do, for they would make us feel as though 
.... !6 .... 



The First Battle 

we were giving protection to more than two police- 
men and a half-shaved sutler. Yet all that we 
discover is a convoy of bloody horses, preceded 
by a pair of oxen wounded by machine-gun fire, 
but still hitched to their yoke. The oxen are toil- 
ing painfully along, and it is we who get out of 
the way, for few of us had thought to see animals 
wounded too. Some mutilated trees rise before us, 
a gaping street corner, a rock smashed to frag- 
ments. It is distinctly humiliating to get into the 
melee from this lower level — through vegetables 
and animals — when we had expected to make 
the descent from its topmost peak, by way of a 
certain general who is reported wounded, and 
should have been lying at the edge of the village, 
under a tree. 

"Haiti 3 ' 

The order is left face — face in the direction 
that we supposed to be safe. And we are, asserts 
the general staff, under artillery fire. They make 
us retire to the ditch. Two extra yards of safety. 

Eight o'clock. The day is dying to-night with- 
out having grown old. The twilight is opaque, no 
thicker and no more transparent in one place than 
in another. It is impossible to guess where the 
sun has set, but the French army, which is so 
.... I? .... 



The First War 

poor at getting the points of the compass, won't 
be the worse for that to-night. All the stars, 
white and dead as the atmosphere, make one 
think of the North at midnight, and the hands of 
even the least rich among us are lit up, as by- 
some sort of powerful radium. The night draws 
nearer us, from behind, as if we were defending it. 
No more shadows; ours have already deserted us, 
as if the battle were going to be serious, as if the 
sergeant-major had asked us for them, just now, 
with our registration books. Not a wandering star 
— all day long the cannon have been shaking down 
from the sky everything that was lightly attached 
to it; no more wavering constellations, nothing 
but the fixed stars buried to their very hilts. 
They are really all one sees; in spite of one's self 
one stares at them, and assumes a gallant and 
haughty air for these remote worlds whose whole 
interest, by the by, must at present be centered 
on Artaud's white horse. 

As we are forbidden to sit down, the men lean 
back to back, cushioned by their packs, and 
thus take their rest in couples, talking softly 
together as they face, one toward the French 
darkness, and the other toward the darkness of 

Alsace. It is our first battle, and we are beginning 
.... !g .... 



The First Battle 

to block out the thoughts and gestures that we 
shall have, once we are fighters. We don't yet 
shake hands with each other, but our glances are 
so heavy that if they fall upon a neighbor's in- 
different eyes, he has, perforce, to smile at us. 
We don't make our wills, but the soldiers who 
owed each other small sums pay them back, or 
cancel the debt. Only one man in the company 
sets down his last wishes: this is Latre, who leaves 
his business to his wife, and his wife to his father. 
We jokingly hand the paper about, and Latre 
follows it from squad to squad, as if to guard a 
precious heritage of his own. 

Jalicot and I take a turn on the road. The men 
are collecting in groups. The square platoons 
have melted into rounded formations, and both 
walking and thinking come more easily along 
this battalion with no sharp corners. We exchange 
quiet words of recognition with the comrades we 
meet in the dark: "C'esttoi?" — "Oui,c' est moil" 
— "C'est vous?" The fellows whose first chance 
it is to show what stuff they are made of are light- 
ing their cigarettes more tenderly than usual. 
That chap yonder seems to feel a remote drowsi- 
ness stealing over him, — the sleep that comes 
after battle, — and he yawns. All at once our 
.... I9 .... 



The First War 

ignorance of war weighs us down, as if this were 
the night before an examination. We are almost 
ready to go over our military theory again, and 
feel guilty to have neglected our haltings, and our 
deployments. But chiefly, without respite, we 
think of the first wounded and the first dead of the 
battalion. All the mental power we have stumbles 
sharply over this first corpse. We understand the 
second, and the third, and toward the hundredth 
we ourselves stretch our stark length on the 
ground; but suddenly, in spite of us, the first dead 
whom we have finally laid out in our minds comes 
back to life, scrambles to his feet, and the whole 
thing has to be done over again. When a soldier 
who is setting a match to his pipe lights up bis 
face for an instant, we tremble for him as if he 
were flashing a signal to death. Our shoulders 
slump; age comes upon us. Restlessly we wander 
up and down in this darkness which makes vic- 
tory seem scarcely more desirable than morning. 
11 C est toi?" "Yes, it's I," comes the tremulous 
answer, out of a deep courage. . . . 

A noise of galloping — the captain of the gen- 
eral staff brings the colonel an order to attack 
the village of Enschmgen. The church-tower can 
be seen, just ahead of us, two kilometers farther 
.... 20 •••• 



The First Battle 

on. . . . He also feels it necessary to make a 
speech: — 

"Forward, men of Roanne! — as you charged 
the Austrians!" 

That 's an old story. We did, in fact, beat the 
Austrians in 1814, at Roanne itself, but — 

"And attention! You are under heavy artillery 
fire." 

He finally leaves us. No, he is coming back 
again, still at a gallop. 

"You are under light artillery fire!" 

Will he reappear in this way for every new 
caliber — for carbines and revolvers? The colonel 
lifts his arm and lets it drop. We are off . . . 

The four companies advance in line, a hundred 
yards apart, all in close formation, and quite silent. 
The men do not utter a word, in spite of their 
desire to know just what they are doing; whether 
this is a march of approach, or a charge, and if 
there will be any machine guns. Here and there 
a miner or a weaver has taken the precaution to 
put out his pipe or cigarette, as he does at the 
factory gate. The men are advancing very fast. 
The crisis of discipline they are undergoing for 
the first time resolves itself into silence and speed, 
and the most disciplined are marching double- 
.... 21 •— 



The First War 

quick. The four sergeant-majors and I escort the 
colonel, who keeps just back of the center of the 
battalion. We follow with some difficulty, across 
fields and meadows broken by hedges. We stum- 
ble against a dead ox, very much swollen, from 
which we are lucky enough to bounce off again, 
and we are always jumping a brook, which keeps 
getting tangled in our legs, like a puttee that has 
come unwound. All at once a search-light illumi- 
nates the right-hand company, which stops, takes 
the mass formation with the precautions recom- 
mended for shells, every head under the pack 
in front, heads in the second rank hidden, eyes in 
the first line closed. . . . Darkness again. Little 
by little the village church-tower retreats under- 
ground, into its trench, and after that we walk 
blindly. No more cannon. A bullet, one single 
bullet, passes us by, spent — one single German 
does us the honor of firing at us. It must be the 
soldier who is throwing the search-light. 

They are going so fast that there is no keeping 
up with them. We lose sight of them, and the 
terrain is difficult: sometimes grass or clover, then 
suddenly, straight across our path, rows of cab- 
bages, artichokes, and dahlias. The meadows lie 
in the direction we are going, but the market- 

.... 22 •••• 



The First Battle 

gardens are set at a slant, as if they were trying 
to thwart our march. A cavalryman springs up 
behind us and asks the colonel to wait for the 
general, so we hurry the sergeant-majors off to 
the companies. A second cavalryman orders us 
to go on: we go on. A third and a fourth arrive at 
top speed, from Heaven knows where, and dis- 
mount and draw up beside us, but always one 
behind the other, for the cavalry of the general 
staff circles screenwise during a battle. With the 
exception of Chalton, who has not found his com- 
pany, the sergeant-majors have not come back. 
We send dragoons out as scouts, but there is 
nothing to the right or left of us, and before us, 
five hundred yards away, loom a hill and a forest. 
There are only the six of us in the valley, and it 
appears that we are in plain view. 

A wave of coolness; the first layer of dew falls 
on our guns; the soldier of the search-light fires a 
last shot; the Enschingen steeple suddenly starts 
up on the right, far in the rear; a partridge whirs 
from under our feet — certainly the companies 
have not come by here. We slacken our pace 
and once more cross the brook, only to stumble 
into a long rectangle of carrots. We give way in 
discouragement before their impenetrable thick- 
.... 23 .... 



The First War 

ets, and resolve to go no farther. We let the horses 
nibble them a minute; one of the dragoons tastes 
them himself, while Chalton and I, kneeling in 
their pungent leaves, fire the first shots of the 
regiment on two electric lanterns that twinkle out 
of the forest. He hits the first squarely, but mine 
does not go out till a few minutes later — when 
the electricity fails, he tells me. We feel no terror, 
but, little by little, laziness, indifference. Why go 
beyond these carrots and find still worse things — 
trenches of beets, perhaps? The man with the 
best ear puts it to the ground — nothing but the 
rustling of grass-blades, and the pawing of the 
horse on which the man with the best sight has 
climbed to look off. The man with the best con- 
science is already asleep. The colonel is studying 
his map. No doubt whatever that we are between 
the lines, and the companies must have stopped 
at one of the two villages behind us, Spechbach 
or Enschingen. Which one shall we return to? 
Which one is inhabited? We are in no special 
hurry, for we are no longer in any danger; our 
shadows have come back to us. Indeed, we are 
getting some fun out of this little adventure, 
which saves us from digging ditches or mounting 
guard back there, in the rear, and we are mean- 
.... 24 .». 



The First Battle 

while enjoying a calm and a security never to be 
experienced in this war except when one is equally 
remote from both the French and the German 
sentinels, and with one's colonel. Every now and 
then a shot rings out, followed by another, 
shorter, dryer, as if the sharpshooter were hasten- 
ing to pick up the man he had wounded. As we 
sit one opposite the other on the ground, we 
again form one of those rounded groups from 
which peace draws its life. We feel ever so clearly 
that no new era is beginning, and begin to smoke, 
and snap our fingers at Fate, and drink just as we 
did in the preceding era. The colonel decides on 
Spechbach . . . Spechbach it is. ... A round pond 
has been set before the village, like a mirror before 
the lips of a sleeping man. Not a ripple, not a 
murmur . . . Spechbach is dead. . . . We advance. 

. . . Now comes an hour which does not belong 
to the regiment, and which Captain Lambert 
has made us erase from our journals. Wounded 
and dead are what we find here. The sentinel 
who stops us has his forehead tied up in a red- 
dened bandage — did the bullet, the one bullet, 
find its mark? In the first house numbers of 

wounded have established themselves in very 
.... 25 .... 



The First War 

illogical fashion, the most seriously hurt on the 
second floor, as if they were afraid of flood being 
added to bullets. On a bench before a farm, an 
officer lies asleep, with a layer of bloody cotton on 
his breast. It is n't one of our commanders. His 
regimental number is one unit less than ours, 
and to reassure us he wears it everywhere he 
can — on his cap, his coat-collar, his shirt-collar: 
Fate has missed us by just one. 

"Where do you come from?" asks the colonel. 

He wakes and gives us mechanically what was 
this very morning — before he had come back 
from death itself — the right answer. 

"From . . . from Chambery." 

Then he sees the five stripes. 
; "The colonel ... the colonel is dead," he says. 

It is my cap he is now staring at with his 
puzzled eyes, looking for my rank under its cover; 
possibly he does not consider it exalted enough to 
add, "The sergeant . . . the sergeant has been 
killed," so he drowses off. 

We start on again. Chalton has a little Cham- 
bery blood on his hand. He shows it to his dra- 
goon, to make him believe he is wounded, and 
he thinks so himself, every time he lights a fresh 
cigar. 



Ill 

WAR IS LONG 

Bemwiller, August 20. 
We occupied Enschingen at exactly midnight, and 
were off to Bemwiller by three o'clock. A warm, 
peaceful day. I am put in charge of the hostages 
who have gone to sleep in some hay-carts — all 
but a nervous mayor who should be celebrating 
his birthday, and whose family are waiting for 
him ; he sits lamenting on the open planking of the 
floor long after all the others have fallen through, 
under the weight of their own sleep. We organ- 
ize our forces, we deploy, we dig trenches op- 
posite Enschingen, as if we had no other object 
in this war than to take this village once a day. 
Breakfast with Devaux at an old Alsatian's, a 
deaf-mute who is eager to serve us, protected as 
he is by his infirmities from any denunciation 
for treason. 

The discovery of a hen's egg, and then a 

duck's egg, brings us by lunch-time to the idea 

of the omelet which we prepare at the house of 

two German twin sisters. At last we have the 

.... 27 .... 



The First War 

impression of being conquerors ! The least word 
from us sets this pair of likenesses off at a run* 
colliding as they go: blonde and brunette, both 
to do our pleasure. On the walls, with their gray- 
paper, we note some square patches of a lighter 
shade. Evidently they were once covered by 
picture-frames — indeed, one might reconstruct 
the whole Imperial Family, according to their 
more or less faded hue. I scare the slaves to 
death by asking them where they have hidden 
these portraits, and Devaux, with no malicious 
intent, puts questions that are now threatening, 
now polite: Has the Emperor really got creep- 
ing paralysis? What are their Christian names? 
How is the war going to end? What does the 
word "gemutlich" mean? They answer only the 
polite questions, but do so in the terror that the 
sacrilegious inquiries have roused: their names — 
tremblingly — are Elsa and Johanna: gemutlich 
means, "when all is well, when all is gay." "Yes- 
terday ist es gemutlich" says Devaux, by way of 
example. 

"/a," they reply, "ja." 

One has only to dangle the word "gemutlich" 
before a German woman's eyes to make her an- 
swer with these joyous brayings. 
.... 2 8 .... 



War is Long 

My company is occupying Henner's house and 
park. All the men are stretched out in the hol- 
lows in the lawns, or under the shade of the bushes, 
and are sleeping on their backs and sides, with 
their knees bent or extended. In fact they give us 
all the pictures that Henner would have painted, 
had the shrubbery been inhabited by soldiers 
instead of by red-haired women. Jalicot has 
visited the chateau; he found nothing there but 
two enormous paint-brushes, — one cherry, the 
other salmon, — Matisse's brushes. All the pic- 
tures have disappeared from the walls, as at 
Elsa's and Johanna's; but the mirrors remain. 
Since leaving Roanne we had only seen ourselves 
in little round two-cent mirrors which barely 
showed us one eye, or the parting of our hair. 
So we examine ourselves thoroughly, before I 
go back to join the other sergeants, who are 
lying on the lawn. Stretched on my back beside 
them I listen to their talk of their wives, and 
when my turn comes, admire the photographs of 
Mme. Sartaut which her husband produces. I 
see her in bicycling costume, in her bathing- 
suit, leaning on a prie-dieu at the edge of a 
beach, and every time she is fondling a different 
dog; her profession is to take rich dogs to board. 
.... 29 .... 



Tloe First War 

There she is in a boat, with a dog that belonged 
to Sarah Bernhardt, and Sartaut talks of Sarah 
who earns a million a year, is over seventy, and 
hasn't saved a penny: the woman, so his wife 
declares, has no sense of order. But the garish 
actresses, the stout South Americans whom the 
dog of the hour half reveals are nothing to 
us. It is the charming, clear-cut little French- 
woman, with lowered eyes and trim figure, whom 
we love; it is somehow she who makes the im- 
pression that we are in Alsace a precious one. 

At six o'clock we take our departure for Upper 
Spechbach. We are beginning an enveloping 
movement about the unfortunate Enschingen. 
Mulhouse has given less trouble: we learn that 
it is ours, and that eighty cannon and eight 
hundred natives were captured on the left. We 
insist that Captain Perret, who has his Joanne 
guide-book, shall read us the page on Mulhouse: 
61 The station is small, dark and inconvenient, in 
striking contrast to the luxurious post-office" We 
should like, too, to hear the page on Friburg, 
because it is toward Friburg that we are going. 
But Friburg is not in Alsace, in spite of the 
assertions of those who confuse it with the Swiss 
Friburg. 

.... 30 .... 



War is Long 

March with no event to mark it save the arrest 
of Babette Hermann, aged eighteen, who had 
gone to Bern wilier to have a tooth pulled, and 
wanted to go home in spite of the battle, because 
the Sister who acted as dentist hurt her so much; 
and got caught in the brigade, with the black 
ribbon that she must use on Sundays for her 
Alsatian bow tied around her swollen jaw. 

Aspach, August 24. 
Devaux is in a bad humor; he has nothing but 
a card from his wife, whom he married just before 
he left; she really might have written him a letter. 
He manages, however, to steal a mattress, on 
which five of us try to sleep. No bed-bugs, as we 
feared, but toward midnight a horse that comes 
into the house and snuffs at us; he gets a whack 
and stumbles out. At one o'clock the cooks estab- 
lish themselves in our courtyard. It 's absolutely 
no good struggling — all that we had managed 
to assemble in the way of a peaceful conscience, 
that first essential of sleep, they banish with the 
noise recommended in Algiers for driving off 
grasshoppers. I go out and sit down by their 
camp-fire; not the fire where their coffee is boil- 
ing, but their feu de luxe, their extra fire — they 
.... 3I .... 



The First War 

always build two fires, as if they were making 
an ellipsis, not doing the cooking. Three or four 
soldiers are there already, some leaning over 
the flame, the rest turning their backs, for the 
warmth is slight, and does not penetrate even 
halfway through a man. In the region of the 
heart one stays frozen. We keep it up frugally, 
lighting each faggot from the faggot that is dying, 
so that the pile may last till morning. My drum- 
mer, whose face is illuminated, is having a discus- 
sion with a soldier whose face is in the shadow; he 
is winding up a story of which I hear only the 
last sentences: "I kill him with my lead cap" — 
"He had at least six hands" — "His blood was 
golden" . . . These fellows must be telling their 
dreams, unless the common man has a night lan- 
guage without logic or humanity. . . . Sometimes 
the faggot is green and smokes us out — but 
smoke is more or less heat. A little French star, 
quite still till then, suddenly begins to make 
signals to us. Toward three o'clock a sergeant- 
major comes by to see that the unnecessary fires 
are put out. In Paris they extinguish every other 
gas-lamp, but we don't obey; indeed, we say 
nothing at all, and he loses his temper when he 

finds himself opposed by shadows. Finally the 
.... 32 .... 



War is Long 

weak brother among us, the man who will kill 
wounded dogs on command, and break confis- 
cated bottles of alcohol, stifles our fire by beating 
it with the faggot he was going to put on. We 
stay by the cinders, though, until they are chill, 
rubbing our fingers over the last coals. Then 
dawn arrives by a door that lets in a sharp north 
wind, too. We turn up our damp collars, and pull 
our cravats tighter. A cock crows. Only once, 
and day comes. Alsace too? We only have to 
deny Alsace once. 



A long morning. I am officially chosen to buy 
garlic and onions for the battalion, for the Alsa- 
tian vegetables really have too difficult names. 
At eight o'clock, order to make ready to leave. 
Four hours of waiting follow, packs on our backs, 
and guns at ease. Clam's alarm-clock goes off in 
his pack, and the officers turn cantankerous, and 
refuse to let me get rid of my onions. I have 
fifty bunches left, which I finally hand out to the 
same company. At noon, the general staff makes 
up its mind to send us orders to start. 

The sky has also settled its mind. It will be 

blue for ten minutes, and cloudy for the next ten. 
.... 33 .... 



The First War 

The clouds, instead of looking like Asia and Eng- 
land, will imitate our comrades: there's Bernard, 
with his beard, and Lieutenant Pattin, with a 
real eye pierced to the blue beneath. We follow a 
valley road, very low in our spirits, for it is only 
the highways that lead to the cities. It appears, 
however, that we are going toward Friburg. The 
regiment winds and uncoils its length like a snake, 
so that every man of us sees the whole of it from 
his own place for the first time. A Louis XIV sun, 
with slanting rays, reserves all its gold for the 
supply company. The sappers sparkle, the tele- 
graphers are ablaze, the artificer, like Danae, 
bursts into a golden shower. Since the colonel 
has taken me for interpreter, my position during 
our marches is in the first rank of the company 
on guard, as sentinel to the four men at the head. 
There are eight companies, and the soldiers never 
change their conversation, so on every march I 
take up the conversation where it left off eight 
days earlier; that gives me thirty-two new com- 
rades, the thirty-two biggest fellows in the regi- 
ment who hail me when they see me, and call out 
good-morning in the bivouacs. To-day it's the 
company where they always talk about the war. 
The men are trading precepts inherited from their 
.... 34 .... 



War is Long 

fathers who went through 1870: "Cut off the 
buttons of the prisoners' drawers"; "Stuff your 
boots with newspapers when there is a frost" — a 
whole innocuous science which it would have 
taken quite one day to learn; the War of 1870 will 
shorten this war by just one day. 

I slip back to the next company, to little 
Bollero, who is twenty, the only soldier from the 
active corps in these three thousand reserves — a 
little poet buried in the middle of his section; he 
manages, however, to slip the edge when I pay 
him a visit. He thinks, too, that we are going 
toward the Rhine, although we are marching 
against the sun, that is to say, westward. He con- 
fides to me, active poet that he is, that he has 
been composing eulogies since morning (he is at 
the eulogistic stage); not eulogies in verse, he 
explains, but in rh}^thmic prose; marching at ease 
on the roads, though bad for rhymes, is favorable 
to tonic accents. To-day he has composed a 
eulogy for Petipon, one for the colonel, and one 
for our Cuban volunteer: Cuba, dont nous ignorons 
la male forme, car seule la premiere carte de Colomb 
y est permise ei, pour effiler Vile, Colomb fit cinq 
voyages. He recites them all to me. It is his inten- 
tion to compose, by way of preface, the eulogy 
.... 35 .... 



The First War 

of eulogies — as he makes this last admission he 
suddenly falters, and looks at me with such wide 
and shining eyes that I divine his plan, and turn 
so self-conscious that I don't dare make any more 
gestures except in front of the "movie" camera. 



What a strange itinerary! What can Michal be 
thinking of! A village bent into a right angle sud- 
denly sends us back toward France. Then, by a 
series of acute angles, we go north again; then, 
over a piece of state highway, east. It looks as 
though we were anxious to escape from a French 
army, or a French magnet lying in wait for us in 
the next hollow. We rejoice to see the mountains 
rising between us and Belfort; we barricade our- 
selves with the Vosges against this force which is 
impelling us to return to France. We did not 
know that this was the day of Charleroi. . . . 

All the trees and thickets of this heavy country 
now ease themselves by throwing off their shad- 
ows, and turn blue. As we come down each slope 
a many-folded valley is lit up for us at its foot, 
and then gradually goes out again; and all the 
leaves that will be yellow next month are bathed 
in sunshine. On the slate roofs of the church- 

.... 3 6 .... 



War is Long 

towers, sunbeams glance and shiver into frag- 
ments. At all the cross-roads, tempting signs 
point out Colmar, Strasburg, then Friburg — 
reducing the kilometres to the lowest possible 
figure, avoiding round numbers like department 
stores: 59, 99, 119. We cross a swift brook which 
wears its name on its bridge, as if it were a neck- 
lace: the Doller. Beyond the bridge, a house 
standing alone, as in France; a garden surrounded 
by walls, as in France. We are no longer used to 
seeing such places, and tremble for this lonely 
house — all the men have noticed it, and sud- 
denly feel, framed within their minds, their house 
and meadow in Auvergne. 

Toward night the sergeant who distributes the 
mail rides the length of the regiment on his 
bicycle to give out the Bulletin des Armies to 
every sergeant-major. I marvel at the first sen- 
tence: " To-day, August jrd, nothing new. England 
declares war on Germany." The Bulletin also con- 
tains the story of a tenor of the Opera Comique 
who somehow got mixed up in a battle. " I should 
have preferred," he concluded, "to sing la Tosca." 
At eight o'clock, we reach Aspach. I leave 
Dollero perfectly happy, for, in the midst of his 
eulogies, he has found an epigram. Epitalon, 
.... 37 .... 



The First War 

Major Gerard's cavalry sergeant, who is wanting 
to get engaged, has just inspired it: — 

Fasse qu'il prenne bientot femme 

Car, Apollon, 

Je tnedite V epithalame 

D'Epitalon. 

I sadden him by insisting that this is a eulogy, 

too, not an epigram . . . but here we are at 

Aspach. I halt with the secretaries at a big farm 

beside the road, and for the first time we give 

ourselves the treat of seeing our regiment file 

past. The four leaders — the face, as it were 

— of each company are the only ones to nod to 

me, except for the onion company, which is one 

long grateful smile. 

* 

* * 

A real woman at last ! Till to-day — we have n't 
been through anything but villages and farms to 
be sure — only aged peasant women, the sort 
who die while they are puttering over the lamps, 
or hobbledehoys in homespun. None of those 
blonde notaries' wives with eyes of fire, the an- 
guish and the delight of their husbands; none of 
those frenzied women of the jewelers' shops, so 

honest in their sudden passion (for soldiers buy 
.... 38 .... 



War is Long 

little jewelry), who, during the maneuvers, used 
to give us the impression of conquering Clermont- 
Ferrand or Issingeaux as soon as we had reached 
the suburbs. None of those velvet shirts edged 
with pink that even a child expects to see at 
the frontiers of the regions which are personified 
by women. And yet we had taken pains to enter 
Alsace on a Sunday — and after such a journey! 

O Frenchwomen of the stations, how you all, 
the very least of you, live on in our memories! 
Lining our path, waiting for us at the stops of the 
trains, the chattels of each man of us, and his 
willing slaves; racing from the grade-crossings to 
the towns — it was downhill — to fill twenty can- 
teens that were empty when you took them, but 
weighed twenty pounds when you returned over 
the uphill road; unable to resist giving two rolls 
of chocolate to every soldier — instead of only 
one — yet despairing when your supply was ex- 
hausted; bourgeoises, peasants, little girls with 
their English nurses — thus did you alternate 
along our railway line, like adventures in the lives 
of famous travelers. 

Now a teacher, who had had every one of her 

pupils write and sign a " letter of good cheer" to 

the soldiers; next a butcher's wife, whose stock 
.... 39 .... 



The First War 

had already been distributed, but who suddenly 
bethought herself of her preserves, and ran to her 
cupboards; then some young girls at a miner's 
station, — dark, slim, consumed by war, — al- 
ready changing for our benefit the five-franc notes 
that they were to have kept all their lives as 
souvenirs; then, at two in the morning, a pair of 
timid cousins who noiselessly pushed open the 
door of our slumbering car, and trembled with 
joy to see it suddenly rouse itself, jump out on to 
the dark, sanded platform, and stuff its knap- 
sacks with chocolate of which they proudly named 
the brand. And let not that fair statue, that 
golden head which studied every soldier's face 
and refused me a second glass of beer, — although 
I had again stood in line, — be forgotten either; 
or that heart-stricken wife, who watched the 
others from under the luminous acacias without 
lending a hand to help them — she could not bear 
to see us, yet could not keep away; she could not, 
in her fear and sorrow, name her husband's regi- 
ment, yet finally murmured it through her sobs. 
A living hedge, a hedge of women, all the 
way to the frontier, all within a yard of us, — 
except the girl at Montceaux, who consistently 
refused to come near, — standing outside of the 
.... 40 .... 



War is Long 

train's trench, outside of their own lives, outside 
of modesty, ready, they, too, to die, and defying 
the express trains: all the women, in short, who 
hide behind each other in our lives, whose innum- 
erable arms and gestures we had never seen till 
now — condemned as we are to worship a Hindoo 
idol — save through the one woman who was 
nearest to us. All that their own meager experi- 
ence had denied them thus passed under these 
soldiers' eyes before their dangers began: the 
glum fellows learned what it means to live 
ardently, the egoists sampled the generous life, 
the weak tried the thrill of decision; for they had 
five minutes to scrape acquaintance, give their 
addresses, and go on again. But where were the 
Alsatian women? They seemed ready to allow 
Alsace to turn masculine, so far as we were con- 
cerned — to transform itself into a Berry or a 
Poitpu, one of those provinces you would not feel 
obliged to make way for if you met her in person 
at a door. They were going to allow us to think 
that there was no truth in the three pictures 
which used to hang on the walls of our first school- 
rooms — those pictures which have mingled and 
confused in our memories a little Alsatian girl, 
a Roman matron with her sons at her knee, 
.... 4I .... 



The First War 

and a twelve-year-old Oceania with no clothes 
on. Often did this academic trinity stir my heart 
with unsatisfied longing. Shall I then forgive the 
little Alsatian — who is now as old as I — for 
hiding herself away, considering that I have 
often, very often, blamed little Oceania for not 
making the voyage to Europe for my sake? 

But now at last I see her. She has come all by 
herself, with a three-year-old baby boy who does 
not look like any continent whatever; rather, 
with his grapes and pears, like a season. She dis- 
plays him to me with all the pride to which a 
feminine symbol, who has brought a little male 
into the world, has a right. She is pretty and 
blooming, and holds up a broad countenance on 
which one's gaze can wander without immedi- 
ately falling off the right cheek, or the left, or 
tumbling into the eyes. One may avoid looking 
her straight in the face and still not seem a de- 
ceiver. And she is called Miiller, as she should be, 
although her first name is Parisian — Fabienne. 
She wears her hair in braids around her head, 
without the black Alsatian bow, but one divines 
from her slight accent that her real head-dress 
and her real first name are only laid by in the 
cupboard. 

.... 42 .- 



War is Long 

It is at her house that I sleep; in her salon, 
furnished at Strasburg but diversified with sou- 
venirs of her only journey to Paris: an Eiffel 
Tower, a real one with a green lining; a photo- 
graph of the Alexander Bridge on a conch-shell — 
a reminder of everything that has given the Al- 
satians reason to be proud of us in the last forty 
years. A Treport shell is the only object that was 
bought for love of beauty, unless it be a cornucopia 
of flowers carved in mother-of-pearl. How exotic 
do shells appear in the mountains! 

August 25. 
Alarm at four o'clock. It's the fault of the sun 
that was unexpectedly brilliant. Not a cloud, 
not a breath. Everybody predicts in loud tones 
that it is going to be fine, and is enchanted to 
learn it from his neighbor the next moment. From 
the doors, where the level rays strike in, we ex- 
change remarks: that is to say, the sergeants do— 
a sort of caste-mood prevents us from speaking 
to any but our equals in rank in the morning. 
My corporal, who is insolent at night, doesn't 
venture a comment, and the major, yonder, 
has got his secretary on the string: the poor 
fellow is nothing but a worried teacher when he 
.... 43 .... 



The First War 

wakes, and has to recover his importance gradu- 
ally as the day goes on : it is as if he had to pass 
his licence over again every day at noon, and his 
aggregation at four o'clock, with the result that his 
chief is full of consideration by twilight, and 
always invites him to dinner. The optimistic ser- 
geants greet each other without waiting for a 
reply, simply taking for granted, in every sen- 
tence of their dialogue, the word "finely." 

"How goes it?" 

"And you?" 

"That's great!" 

At five the regiment is ready. From time to 
time comes the order to shoulder our packs; 
then, ten minutes later, the order to put them 
down again. Usual promenade of the buglers and 
drummers who don't know where they belong, 
and are sent by every captain to a different end 
of the village. They stop at the town-hall, the 
presbytery, and the chateau, as the band does on 
New Year's Day in the provinces. Calls are ex- 
changed between neighboring companies; an ele- 
gant soldier, with waxed mustaches, comes to in- 
quire formally of Corporal Pierlit if he is allied, 
as he puts it, to the music-hall queen — begs par- 
don for the mistake, and goes off as proud as if he 
.... 44 .-. 



War is Long 

had paid a call behind the scenes at the Eldorado. 
A diversion: the sergeant with the mail. We all 
get out our pencils and sit down. The least let- 
tered among us stretch out to do their writing, 
and the fellows that remain standing are egoists 
or orphans. When the cards are all finished, we 
bring our field journals up to date, and Barbarin 
asks me to lend him mine to copy. I hand it to 
him without making any objection, as he would 
not understand a refusal, and he transcribes with 
joy: "Aspach. Burnt houses. Fabienne. Eiffel 
Tower." I explain that Fabienne is the name of 
my hostess, but he had already guessed it, and 
guessed, too, that she is very tall and thin. In 
exchange, he lets me read his journal, where, up 
to now, he has found nothing but orders and pass- 
words to set down: "August 19, Napoleon, Namur. 
August 20, Samain, Solferino." He offers to let 
me copy it, if I care to. 

Finally we are off. I leave four druggists on 
bicycles of German make in the care of an artil- 
lery lieutenant. They insist that they are going 
to Mulhouse, as their villages are all out of aspirin. 
They also declare, when we call this in question, 
that their villages need quinine and aconite. 
Jalicot suggests bandaging their eyes, but they 
.... 45 .... 



The First War 

politely protest, begging pardon as if he were 
offering them a headache plaster: it is aspirin 
they need. The artillery lieutenant winks at 
us. 

"I won't let them go till after the retreat," he 
says. 

The colonel is standing near. 

"What retreat?" he inquires angrily. 

The druggists grin, and Jalicot confiscates the 
bicycles. The lieutenant, standing at attention, 
is searching his mind for a synonym for retreat, 
defeat, and shakes his head impatiently when he 
finds that nothing but rhymes occur to him to- 
day. What's the use? We all see that our Alsa- 
tian campaign is over. The leaders know that 
we are being taken back to France. The soldiers 
understand — it is so easy to understand! — that 
as there is no further resistance in Alsace, there is 
no more need of conquering it. We are happy to 
be marching fast, to be on the route nationale, 
that leads us back towards France. The officers 
return my maps. At the first halt I get back 
Colmar, at the next, Strasburg: my right to the 
plans of these two round cities, whose age one tells 
as one tells the age of trees, is again admitted. 

We are already hunting for maps of Belgium, and 
.... 46 .... 



War is Long 

I am discussing Antwerp with Jadin, who is a 
chief steward on an ocean-liner; as I am an inter- 
preter he feels obliged to talk English with me, 
and tells me he was at Portsmouth when peace 
was signed between Russia and Japan. Jadin, for 
his part, — as his voyage is over when the ship 
touches New York or Havre, — insists that this 
war is over because we have reached Mulhouse. 

"As they say," he remarks in his rare English, 
"war is finished." 

Where do they say so? At Portsmouth? The 
only thing that is finished is this campaign in 
Alsace, which we are bringing to an end, after 
two uneventful weeks, in a more or less dissatis- 
fied frame of mind. We are abandoning Alsace, 
but we can't help feeling that she is abandoning 
us, too. Every orchard, every plane-tree, seems 
to us to be going back to meet the Harth Forest 
behind us — the forest that had earlier barred 
our way — and when we turn around makes 
haste to join its mass on the horizon. Already 
laborers strange to the region are reaping the 
wheat that is still standing high in the German 
fields, the fields whose masters ran away in the 
harvest season. A sudden turn to the left would 

bring us to France in an hour. The men's great 
.... 47 .... 



The First War 

regret is that they cannot strike a Roman road 
which is marked on the map. 

"There it is!" they say, as soon as the highway 
grows broader and harder, and when we stop, 
they glue their ears to its surface as if they ex- 
pected to hear the Romans coming. 

But Cagsar preferred to march in the shade, and 
skirt the little wood. 



IV 

A TRIUMPHAL DEPARTURE 

August 25. 
Suddenly, before us, on the threshold of the 
mountains, appears a city. It is so clearly a city, 
the city of our school geography books, half in 
the plain, half in the mountains, that we hesitate 
to enter it. Above it a mediaeval fortress, its 
towers still in a state of almost perfect preserva- 
tion, but leaning sideways, as in a mirage that 
has not been able to turn completely upside down. 
Never will the general staff, which keeps us away 
even from the county towns, allow us to approach 
this model city, with its Gothic cathedral in the 
middle, its factories on the right, its tiled roofs 
on the left. Captain Perret confirms the fact that 
it is a city, Thann. The signboards, which up to 
this time had only spoken to us of distant cities, 
suddenly announce: Thann, two kilometers. The 
houses are already close together, with little gar- 
dens and iron gates. We inquire: — 

"And here, where are we?" 

"At Thann." 

.... 49 .... 



The First War 

"But down there, on the right, all those fac- 
tories — is that Cernay?" 

"It'sThann." 

What a huge city! Perhaps, too, we are no 
longer used to seeing cities! And the balconies? 
Can one imagine anything more delightful and 
comfortable than the balconies! And the second 
floors, so dangerous in case of fall or fire, but so 
light! And the nursery gardens, with man- traps 
hidden in the shrubbery, from which, neverthe- 
less, the wives and daughters of the stingy horti- 
culturalists rush out with such eagerness that 
they are the only ones who forget to offer us 
flowers. On the sidewalks — how much there is 
to say about the sidewalks, too! — are collecting 
all the people who are ready at nine o'clock in 
the morning — the young girls, the children, the 
invalids; while the mothers and the servants, in 
their wrappers, wave to us from the back courts. 
But I lie: here are men in frock coats, and women 
in black silk dresses, who have got up and dressed 
themselves entirely in our honor. The whole of 
Thann acclaims us — so suddenly that at first we 
look at each other, and then stare in every direc- 
tion to discover what victorious regiment may be 
marching through; we even think for a moment 
.... 5 o .... 



A Triumphal Departure 

that they are celebrating some victory won in the 
north. Nevertheless, it is really we whom they are 
looking at and touching. It is really we, the ser- 
geants, who are being embraced. It is really I, 
whom an old lady singles out to salute from her 
window, bobbing a fresh courtesy every time I 
turn around, indifferent to all the others. 

Thann is cheering us with the everlasting re- 
morse of having met the first French regiment in 
silence, and as it must have acclaimed those who 
went through in the opposite direction a week 
ago. Little does it care. It does not want to 
notice that Michal, with his arms full of roses, is 
turning unhesitatingly at the first cross-roads and 
leading us toward France. That has its advan- 
tages: if we were going toward Germany we should 
not march through the whole length of Thann, 
or be obliged to make our triumphal entry into 
Alsace the day we leave it. All the small selfish- 
nesses that the sight of a town encourages — the 
hope of a glass of beer, or a cake, or a cigar — are 
blotted out by its emotion. We cross it without 
eating or drinking. We invent a more martial 
gait, and our scattered bugles and drums hurry 
to join forces in front of each battalion. Our com- 
pany is lucky enough to have been shaved this 
.... 5I .... 



The First War 

morning: we square our shoulders and present 
our whole countenance to the least glance. The 
joy of being contemplated by eyes which want 
to find loyalty, wit, and courage in you! The 
colonel throws off his cap cover and displays his 
five stripes, Major Gerard his four, every captain 
his three. Soon each of us receives all the homage 
that is due to his rank, and our grades are uttered 
as if they were our names. We did not know how 
to enter cities; in five minutes Thann has given 
us the formula. Captain Perret, who occasionally 
steals a look at his Joanne guide-book when 
nobody is looking, explains the city to us so that 
we may appear to be already familiar with it, and 
tells us that Kleber was an architect here. Thence- 
forth, the soldiers admire every house as if it had 
been built by Kleber, — or, if they have poor 
memories, by Marceau or Hoche. " And the cathe- 
dral," they ask; "who built the cathedral?" 

Thann, which none of us had heard of before 
the war, because on the map your name is drowned 
in the shadow of the Vosges; gateway of Alsace 
that none of us even imagined, which rises sud- 
denly, all wooden roofs and bright geraniums, on 
our homeward path — how much we want to love 

you ! From every house hangs a flag, just one, the 
.... 52 .... 



A Triumphal Departure 

house's standard, an old flag dating from before 
1870, with gold fringe, and silk so stiff and cracked 
from having been folded away in the cupboard 
that the most modest wind would shake it to bits. 
They are all huge, with new staffs; sometimes the 
red has been nailed next the staff, which makes 
the flag heavier and graver, but they are all so 
fragile that each one is watched over by its mas- 
ter, as you watch Chinese lanterns on a holiday, 
to see that they don't go out. 

On every balcony, the old or bent person of the 
family, the one who only sees from high up and 
far away. Standing in their doorways, the shop- 
keepers relieve us of our vow of fasting and pour 
out the contents of their shops upon us — equal 
for the first time, for we need them all equally; 
Balouard, who has broken his eyeglasses, receives 
a whole series of lenses from the watchmaker. 
There are enough to last his lifetime, provided his 
near-sightedness grows worse every year. Chil- 
dren who have begged to run our errands come 
back with the bundle and the change, and hunt 
anxiously for their soldier, discovering that all 
the others look just like him. Artaud, who is a 
butcher by profession, waves his arms and cheers an 

ugly and cross-grained butcher behind a marble 
.... 53 .... 



The First War 

counter; and as the latter cannot imagine that 
Artaud is a colleague, he suddenly believes him- 
self attractive, and after that puts himself 
proudly forward. The optician has stuck flags in 
his wax head, as if it were a map. . . . Even my 
most slow-witted soldier, Bergeot, feels a stir of 
curiosity and asks his neighbor where we are. The 
latter calls out, so that the people of Thann may 
hear: — 

" It's Thann!" 

And he yells again, pointing out Bergeot to the 
people of Thann: — 

" It 'she! It's Bergeot!" 

Next come some comfortable houses: the whole 
family is at the gate — the mother, the father 
with his shiny gold jewelry, the children taking 
off their hats as the officers go by. Next comes 
Saint-Thiebaut, around which we have to make 
a circuit to enter the heart of the town. The three- 
story tower is leaning — always the tendency to 
mirage. My soldiers, who are astonished to find 
the church smaller near to, ask whether this is n't 
a peculiarity of Thann. From the porch emerges 
an old woman in black, who had gone in for the 
six o'clock mass and throws up her hands at the 

sight of us. Then she pulls out her snuff-box, 
.... 54 .... 



A Triumphal Departure 

the only remedy she has for so much emotion, 
and Tantot asks her for a pinch; the tobacco 
is methylated; we all help ourselves and sneeze 
vigorously as long as the old woman can hear. 
Here is the former almshouse, now the town-hall. 
A fat concierge and a pink secretary acclaim us 
with joy. 

Now we have reached the boys' school. What 
a lot of children are still there who refuse to under- 
stand that it's vacation, and war-time! At first 
they stand in a solid mass, but one by one sur- 
render to the charm of a corporal, or a bugle, or 
a gun, and soon there is no one left in the boys' 
courtyard but little girls. Ten-year-old children, 
with great starched collars which make their 
heads stand out as if they had been sliced off 
five-year-olds, who on the very day of the de- 
claration of war were given a hasty explanation of 
what France was, and what Germany was, and 
in an hour understood and learned how to hate; 
— they adore us. There are children with dogs, or 
cats, or sailor caps, with the whiskers that were 
associated in their minds with the return of the 
French; children with breastplates and little hel- 
mets, who tremble with delight if we give them 
our heavy arms to carry, and refuse to let us take 
i '- 55 •- 



The First War 

their guns in exchange. One of them has a black 
bandage over his eyes, and his friends are leading 
him along. A cruel doctor forbids him to see us! 

" Those are infantrymen," they tell him. 
"They've got red trousers." 

"Where do they come from?" 

"From Mulhouse. Look, the tall sergeant is 
going to lend you his cap." 

I give him my cap — a bit large; it covers his 
nose, but he does n't realize it. . . . The whole 
company is soon relieved of its caps, its whistles, 
and its picture post-cards. 

"Those are Roanne post-cards," we explain. 

"And you," the people ask, "where do you 
come from ? " 

A chorus of voices calls: — 

"From Clermont, from Paris, from fibreuil. 
Five of us come from Ebreuil!" 

They pretend to know Ebreuil, which has pro- 
duced so many soldiers, and will search the map 
for it in vain when we have gone. 

We are now opposite the orphanage — the or- 
phans have aged; they are old people to-day, too 
weak to stand: the loss of one's parents leaves 
an ineradicable pang. A little girl is following 

us, going into one house and coming out of the 
.... 56 .... 



A Triumphal Departure 

next one, like a wreath. We are marching in 
slightly broken ranks; in front of all the doorsteps 
stand pails, pails of wine or sweet drinks, accord- 
ing as the giver considers soldiers to be warriors 
or children. The only people to keep their calm in 
the midst of the delirium of the natives and the 
soldiers are the cavalry in cantonment here — 
cuirassiers and dragoons who stand in motion- 
less groups, and watch their hostesses acclaim 
us with the indifference of legitimate guests. Not 
a door, not a window, is closed upon us. The 
houses are wide open even at the back, and one 
sees right through them to the gardens and the 
mountains. For already, quite close by, a high, 
wavy outline follows us, swelling on the horizon 
like the wake of our march. 

It is midday. The sun, which has sufficiently 
lighted us on the right, now illuminates us on the 
left. And always we are greeted by the same cry 
of " Vive la France" which the children shout in a 
throaty fashion, as if it hurt them; it ends by 
moving us to tears, as if we suddenly understood 
it the hundredth time — Bergeot the thousandth. 
We answer with the same cry, but adopt their 
accent in spite of ourselves, and thus do not appear 

to be making a translation from the Alsatian. 
.... 57 .... j 



The First War 

It is closing-time at the factories, and the work- 
men escort us, calling us by our ranks, and give us 
their packages of cigarettes, which we insist on 
their sharing. One of them acts as our guide, 
explaining the factories and parks to us, telling us 
how many children the owners have, and who are 
absent or missing from the families at the doors: 
here a daughter is gone, married in France; there 
a former French senator, dead ten years since. 
He smiles when he learns that we come from 
Roanne. Roanne happens to be a rival city of 
Thann in the manufacture of woven and stamped 
goods. Roanne has lowered wages here; but he 
does not blame us for it. Jalicot inquires: — 

"And the Germans?" 

For the first time they give us the reply for 
which we have been begging for a month. 

" Down with the oppressors ! Long live liberty ! " 
We also make inquiries about the storks, for a 
deserted nest looms on a chimney, and beside it 
a little windmill, put there probably to keep the 
rats away while the lease runs; he answers with 
Alsatian precision : — 

"We had thirteen last year. All Alsace has two 

hundred and seventy-two of them." 

The sergeant-majors of the battalion foregather. 
.... 5 8 .... 



A Triumphal Departure 

They are enchanted; here at last is the town they 
have vainly looked for during fourteen years of 
maneuvers, where they will get a civilian employ- 
ment after they are retired. They ask if there is 
a tax-collector, or a controller. There is all that, 
and a Customs office and station besides, not to 
mention hunting and fishing. At every street 
corner a tourist's signboard informs us of excur- 
sions as well. The sergeant-majors spell out the 
signs: — 

"We'll go to Engelbourg, we'll go to Thanner- 
hubel! One can come back by Albertsf elsen ! " 

Their Corsican accent stumbles over these 
knotty words. 

But we are already in the suburbs. The houses 
draw apart, retreat from the road, back up to the 
river or the mountains. Young girls with round 
faces and black eyes give us country flowers in 
exchange for those we have received in the city. 
Finally we halt near a chateau whose owners come 
forward to greet the colonel. The girls are accom- 
panied by a friend, an Italian cousin, whom they 
have dressed up in the Alsatian costume, whereas 
they themselves are French girls. Thus do the 
girls of Rouen think themselves unworthy to play 

the role of Jeanne d'Arc, and confide it to an 
.... 59 .... 



The First War 

actress. Our Italian sticks a red geranium in every 
gun-breech, as methodically as if she were making 
cuttings. 

We are off again. The men have begun to sing. 
Workmen and peasants, with little understanding 
of their feelings, they believe themselves joyous 
because they are moved. Choruses are formed; 
our kits, too, clink against the steel of our guns, 
and every man, cicada-fashion, makes a silvery 
sound on his own account in the sunshine. My 
company sings the Chant du depart, modifying 
the name of Viala, however, for the benefit of 
Vialard, our fat corporal; and Artaud, who thinks 
this new song superb, comes in a pause to ask me 
to copy it for him. The valley is narrowing; there 
is an echo — this makes us sing the Montagnards. 
Every now and then two towns come together; 
here is Bitschwiller already, and Wilier, although 
the sergeant-majors maintain that we are still in 
Thann. Every town honestly sets forth its alti- 
tude, and the height of the nearest mountain — 
you have only to subtract one from the other to 
free yourself from some lurking care. We cross the 
Thur. Here is Moosch, where our guide takes the 
wrong turn for the first time, and starts us on the 
road to Guebwiller. That will count as a quarter 
.... 60 •••• 



A Triumphal Departure 

of an hour's excursion, and will be deducted from 
our campaigns. 

Next Saint- Amarin, where we make a long halt, 
in a meadow that lies below the river; its children 
come to survey us. We offer them cakes, for we 
have bought out the pastry-shops; but they refuse 
politely, saying that they aren't hungry, and 
accept only our biscuits, which they devour. The 
biggest remark aloud what the Germans would 
not be able to make: stacks of arms so quickly, 
fires so quickly. A little boy asks me for all the 
explanations that I used to demand of soldiers in 
my childhood: if there is a moral difference be- 
tween silver and gold braid, and how you tell a 
second lieutenant from a sergeant-major. He had 
more or less despised sergeant-majors heretofore. 
I show him ours: Forest, always freshly shaved, 
with his opera-singer's eyes, and his neatly pressed 
uniform. That will long be a sacred rank for the 
children of Saint-Amarin. . . . The bugle sounds : 
"The Germans would not drink such boiling hot 
coffee so fast." He asks me to send him a line if I 
am wounded, and writes his address in my note- 
book: Paul Schlumberger, Saint-Amarin, Alsace, 
France. I find a visiting-card in my pocket-book 
and give it to him, although the corner is turned 
.... 61 •••• 



The First War 

down — for I had found, in the rue Falguieres, the 
sculptress whom I had hoped to miss. It occurs to 
me now that Paul could only read my street there, 
not my city. But he must have guessed that it 
was a large one, and he might have written to me 
in the eleven French cities which have more than 
one hundred thousand inhabitants. 

"The Germans wouldn't turn around to say 
good-bye.' ' . . . 

It is pouring in torrents. The mountains draw 
beautiful bluish forests all the way down to their 
bases, to protect them from the rain. The valleys 
widen and our eager eyes seek to plumb their 
recesses, but the showers blend their outlines. 
The towns are almost silent, and the Alsatian 
voices echo more faintly to our songs, as the 
mountain echo swells. From all the cross-roads 
debouch silent troops who have not crossed 
Thann, and travel through our noise without 
mingling with it, like the Saone in the Rhone. 
Now and then a soldier dashes off, finds his way 
into the back of a shop where a mute company is 
collected, and calls: "Long live Thann!" And 
the inhabitants of the city, though it be a city 
jealous of Thann, just blink their eyes without a 
protest. 

.... 62 .-. 



A Triumphal Departure 

We are following a railroad, which has no signs 
now because they were all German and — as it is 
also free of trains — serves as a path for the lame, 
who thus escape our jostling. Near a grade- 
crossing, with lowered gates which are raised only 
for the cripples, I meet Prosper, now an artillery 
scout. His horse, a famous one, Jean de Nivelle 
by name, remembers the last Grand Prix as he 
stands guard behind this enormous hurdle, and 
finds the starter even more clumsy than usual. 
Prosper recalls that, for the vacation before his 
Baccalaureat, he had an "Entrance into Alsace " 
as a subject for a narrative. He did not take a 
roundabout route; he entered it by way of Stras- 
burg, and pursued to the top of the cathedral 
tower a German general, who only escaped him 
by jumping off into space; and I couldn't scoff 
at him because I, too, when I was in the fourth 
year, had failed in my "Entrance into Alsace." 
I had made mine through the towns on the other 
border, through Wissembourg and Freschwiller, 
according to the tales of 1870, and I described 
them backwards, as Chateaubriand did his Greek 
journeys. Another step and I should have been 
in France. One saw in a moment that I had never 
really gone into Alsace at all. 

.... 63 •- 



The First War 

The rain has stopped. We reach Fellering at 
six o'clock, and remain with the second battalion 
which is to stay there in cantonment, while the 
first battalion continues to Urbes. The officers 
establish themselves at a hotel, and I rejoin 
fipitalon and de Fraix in another inn, where we 
dine. This one is the German inn. Its terrace 
overlooks the whole valley; they have selected it 
as they select a howitzer emplacement, and the 
view includes everything that the heaviest mind 
can take in: the church- tower, a mediaeval for- 
tress, and the moon. Evening tucks a German 
sky around this Alsatian earth, a sky low-hanging 
and tightly stretched, for it is the farthest end of 
the sheet. An enormous moon, modeled on the 
face of Simplicissimus. If it could drop like a 
shooting-star, what a giant wish to wish against 
Germany! A sad meal, too, this German supper: 
these bilberries, this salad without oil, and this 
Viennese veal. Must I go to bed with a taste of 
Prussia in my mouth, after so pure a day? No 
beer; a Kellnerin, very down-at-the-heel, comes 
shuffling in to tell us so — dry daughter of the 
Rhine. It bothers me to have my comrades and 
my soldiers take this corner of Brandenburg for 
Alsace. They unreservedly admire the red and 

.... 6 4 •••• 



A Triumphal Departure 

black beams of the ceiling, and the arms of Otho 
of Bavaria on the stained-glass windows; they 
admire the playing-cards which have gold-beveled 
edges, and aces with photographs of cities, and 
flowers, and actresses — they scarcely know 
where they are, for three of them claim to have 
the king. Same difference in matches, cigars, and 
stamps. As they have been accustomed since 
their birth to the changeless French cards, they 
have the impression that this is the country of 
liberty and imagination. They gossip with the 
Kellnerin, who knows barely enough French to 
answer them, and whom they call "little Babette," 
although her name is Magda. They think it 
charming of her to accept a seat in their laps. 
They kiss her. One of them, writing to his par- 
ents in a corner, begins his letter thus: "I write 
you in the sweet embrace of a little Alsatian girl." 
I sleep in her bed — the Alsatian's; a very 
abbreviated bed, which luckily has an open foot, 
so that my legs can stick through; a bed such as 
seals use at the circus. I lie down in my boots, 
but I take off my greatcoat and, like confetti on 
Ash Wednesday, the flowers of Thann fall out on 
to the rug by my bedside, which absorbs them 

and gives me large German flowers in exchange — 
.... 6 5 .... 



The First War 

yellow and garnet. The room has a curse on it; 
I cannot make a gesture which is not borrowed 
from a writer of the German romantic school; if I 
open the window a ray of the moon caresses my 
right cheek, my hair (which has curled for the 
first time), and the bull's-eyes of the stained-glass 
windows, and I feel myself the image of Schwind. 
I repair my revolver, reading a blue letter by 
candlelight, and turn Werther. I get even with 
modern Germany by tearing up a picture of Tir- 
pitz, and one of an unknown student with three 
saber-cuts, and hide the fragments in Magda's 
shoe-box, on the left-hand shelf. In the distance 
a muffled trumpet blows. The most martial of 
the echoes replies with a bugle-note. . . . 

I hear a bugle in Alsace. . . . 

How I pity my friends in China! 



Portuguese Days 



PORTUGUESE DAYS 

To Major Carlos de Albuquerqtie de Santa Rosa y Ovar 
As I was in dress uniform, the whole population 
followed us. First the little girls, carrying the 
little boys — for in your country, too, the sisters 
are somewhat older than their little brothers — 
in deep baskets on their heads. In Maureria, the 
girls were naked; in Lapa, where the German 
Embassy had formerly protested, they had been 
swathed in figured cotton. Then the beggars, 
whom one recognized by a copper badge, with the 
word mendigo engraved upon it. Then the fisher- 
women of Ovar, with ropes bound about their 
waists, like your monuments of the time of Man- 
uel; they have eyes on either side of their faces, 
so that to see me they had to walk past me 
instead of following me. The women who sell 
fuchsias — for one never steals fuchsias in Portu- 
gal — deserted their shops for us. And finally came 
the Belem orphans, in pink smocks striped with 
carmine, ail of whom, in their ignorance of the 
years which must separate parents and children, 
certainly wished just now that I were their father. 

.... 69 -• 



Portuguese Days 

"What do you expect?" you said. "It's the 
same m Paris when a Portuguese comes to town." 

They were all barefoot, and walked in their 
sunshine with less noise than Esquimaux in their 
snow; when a heel echoed near us, we were aware 
that some less devoted being was going by. And 
so it proved: it was either one of those Spaniards 
who have come to Portugal to spy out how their 
three rivers end; or the policeman whose duty it 
was to herald my passing with "Long live war" 
and "Life to Life"; or else it might be Reigini, 
the prima donna of the Italian company, who 
had stifled her neck and wrists in fur against 
the clasp of her lovers, and reddened her lips and 
the corners of her eyes with the same stick of 
rouge. There was, moreover, an old gentleman 
in boots who insisted on accompanying us, and 
even stopped me, in the height of his admiration, 
to point to my saber and inquire — in a French 
that like yours was innocent of verbs — why the 
sheath was bruised. 

" War ? Battle ? " he inquired. 

"No," I replied, "valise." 

By the tramway, and then the funicular, thus 
dispersing first those who had only one penny, 
then those who had only two, we climbed to 
70 •••• 



Portuguese Days 

Alcantara with the rich alone. To introduce 
Lisbon to me, you placed me at a chosen spot 
among the palms where each tree hides a factory 
chimney — they were smoking; then near the 
Estrella Church you made me walk forward in a 
circle till the openings in its two bell-towers came 
opposite each other, and I could run them both 
through at once with an arrow. From there, as I 
was tired, you consented — but only on condi- 
tion that in the afternoon we should see the castle 
built of fishing-rods — to go down again toward 
the harbor. The long squares of your city, with 
their wavy black mosaics, looked as if they had 
been sprinkled with fresh ink. On every house- 
front the Louis XV of the windows and the Chi- 
nese arabesques of the roofs struggled hard to come 
together, but one set of scrollery seemed to recoil 
timidly before the attack of the other. In the per- 
pendicular streets tiny babies swaddled tight to 
the shoulders were lying on the pavement; their 
huge heads rested on the sidewalk, and pivoted 
them out of the way when automobiles passed by. 
Glued to the faience that decorates the lower 
stories of the houses were naked little girls, and on 
the topmost balconies — there was nothing on the 

floors between to soften the brusque transition — 
.... 7I .... 



Portuguese Days 

stood your passionate young women, with their 
glistening temples, who wear yellow gloves and 
muslin dresses, with black stockings and white 
felt hats. Young girls, attracted by the stir we 
made, stuck their heads out through the iron 
gratings of the ground-floor windows, and taken 
prisoner in the bars, just shut their eyes when we 
stared at them. If we came nearer they turned 
deaf — nearer still, breathless and pale. 

Then through mean streets, where a parrot 
hangs above every door and shrieks out its enor- 
mous number, our procession advanced, describ- 
ing the appropriate geometrical figure about 
every historical point — a circle around the pave- 
ment where the King was killed, an oval about 
the bench whence Pombal drove the Jesuits into 
exile — until it finally reached the Colonnade on 
the edge of the Tagus. We leaned on the balus- 
trade of the river — for it flows on the level of 
the Square, or rather above it, since one has to 
climb two steps to embark — and you showed 
me the Vasco-da-Gama, your Admiral's cruiser, 
whose officers cannot appear in Lisbon except on 
horseback; the Adamastor, which was carrying 
the school for illegitimate little girls to the other 
bank for a holiday — the mothers were saying 

.... 72 .... 



Portuguese Days 

tearful good-byes, and we heard the expectant 
fathers shouting joyfully on the far side of the 
river; finally you pointed out the boat without a 
deck, where the copper letters that composed the 
names of the sixty confiscated German ships are 
being piled up indiscriminately, so that your litte- 
rateurs may find the same number of Portuguese 
names there — names of poets and kings. Now 
and then we caught under the swell the glimmer 
of long streaks of light — crossed steel rails, deep 
below there, that shift boats toward Halifax or 
Pernambuco; and monstrous barks kept passing 
by, barks with crooked prows, and rusty sails, 
and cyclopean eyes painted in front — and one 
eye was not enough, each boat had two. 

"Roman barks!" I said. 

"No," you replied, "Portuguese." 

A cloud veiled the sun, melted away again; 
and Lisbon opened and shut like a fan. All the 
plaster that had crumbled off the walls of your 
city was being tossed into a boat on the quay. 
The air quivered in zigzag lines about the flag- 
staffs on the walls of your palaces, taking them 
for seismographs. The dogs were sneezing, hesi- 
tating to plunge into this peppery sea. The eleven 
o'clock processions went by: they were Unionists 
.... 73 .... 



Portuguese Days 

demonstrating angrily because decorations had 
just been restored on account of the war; and the 
death penalty as well, for everybody, including 
those who were decorated. Yonder, the diplo- 
matic corps was putting one of its three wives 
aboard the steamer: the attaches, in uniform, 
were singing the verse common to all national 
hymns; the second secretaries were bringing fare- 
well gifts — they carried rolls of blue linen 
stamped with red baskets, and their pockets over- 
flowed with inkstands with bells on them, and 
ivory Saint Madeleines (whose little silk frocks 
had been packed in the trunks) in their naked- 
ness. There came along finally the other officer 
of my mission, implacably pursued by the natives 
because you had explained to him that one never 
gives to Portuguese beggars. You told him one 
must say, "Keep patience!" at which they stop 
short as if a prescription for life had been sug- 
gested to them for the first time. But my fellow- 
officer said, "Keep patience," to newspaper boys, 
to shopkeepers, to venders of sole, to all those for 
whom your phrase was a command to follow him; 
and so they followed patiently, waiting till he 
knew the Portuguese for "buy." 

The air was burning, but licked by tongues of 
.... 74 .... 



Portuguese Days 

ice. Motors were coming down the Avenida at 
top speed, those of the high officials, who are not 
afraid of lawsuits, turning in a zigzag around the 
lamp-posts in the middle. Negroes armed with 
rubber hose were caressing the least swollen palm- 
trees; I asked you if they were blowing them up, 
and you explained that they were watering them. 
On the Rocio everybody was already collecting 
in front of the Green Hat Club, to stand or take 
his ease opposite the station clock; for they were 
going to change to winter time, go back from 
noon to eleven o'clock, and receive as a siesta an 
hour which at home the State gives out in sleep. 
The innumerable watchmakers of the town, half 
emerging from their black facades whose doors 
are bordered with gray-blue, were in a great state 
of excitement; they insisted that the large hand 
must be turned eleven times, stopping even for 
the halves. On the cafe terraces, all the fathers, 
with those three daughters whom they take out 
for a walk by the ocean at sunset to see the 
"green ray" appear, were smiling with expec- 
tation and sensuous pleasure. One minute of 
twelve. Up went our spy-glasses. . . . Noon. The 
little hand simply turned back an hour, and the 

disgusted watchmakers went in again. The 
.... 75 .... 



Portuguese Days 

fathers became suddenly sad, the daughters affec- 
tionate. The fair Brazilians, who had put into 
port for an hour that proved superfluous for their 
ends, smiled at this European time which folded 
up like a hammock to take them in; and the 
blue-browed Orientals, wrapped in a' redoubled 
laziness in the depths of their calashes, turned 
their carriages toward us, so as to avoid having 
to turn their eyes. In one word — for you know 
everything — you explained to me why these 
superb beings smile at French officers, why they 
were gay or sad, talkative or mute, why they 
glittered with jewels, why one of them had both 
breasts bare. 

"Cocottes," . . . you said. 
* 
* * 

Your charming country was the first I had seen 
in two years where there was no war. It took me 
a long time to find my eyes of peace again; a long 
time not to feel within me, when an old woman 
laughed, or a happy person passed, the joyful 
sense that a son was home on leave, or that a 
wounded man had been saved. I used to dash 
toward a show-window which had suddenly 
drawn a crowd as if I were going to see ten thou- 
.... 7 6 .... 



Portuguese Days 

sand prisoners, or Saint-Quentin recaptured — 
and it. was only a china dog which bobbed its 
head and stuck out its tongue. When you pre- 
sented me to one of your friends, I replied with 
infinite precaution, infinite scrupulousness, as one 
must at home, to avoid all risk, speak to strangers 
as if they had been alone in the world since their 
birth. I chattered with grandmothers and their 
grandsons without seeming to suspect that a son, 
or a son-in-law, had ever been in the least neces- 
sary to the fashioning of their group. Sometimes 
a beggar used to shake his wooden bowl outside 
my window at dawn, and I waked with a start 
later in the morning under the impression that I 
was being invaded by one of those groups of 
girls who collect money on our Serbian, Belgian, 
or Roumanian Sundays. A fine country yours 
was, where machinists and piano-movers had not 
become — to the confounding of art by the war 
— poor feeble creatures, and where women in 
offices and tramways did not mark the place of 
men who were absent, or a woman in half- 
mourning that of a man who was " missing." We 
were to live there as I used to live three years 
ago, in a country where death does not exist, 

plunging our arms casually into human hearts, 
.... 77 .... 



Portuguese Days 

talking of the past and the future as in a children's 
country. ... 

" Salute these officers, for they bring us war!" 
Thus did your generals present the three Eng- 
lishmen and the three Frenchmen of the mission 
to the troops. This took place on the fields worn 
bare by squad drill, squares which the world over 
are as like as two bald heads, for they show the 
very woof of the earth. First at Thamar, between 
the stationer's shop and the Hindoo cloisters, 
which were visited by bees and swollen as if the 
whole swarm had attacked their marble columns; 
then at Braga (your only city where the shadow 
of the houses does not make a Chinese pattern in 
the street), in the market-place, where they had 
collected the thousand-year-old boundary stones 
of the Roman road and set them — more happily 
than the contemporary Latin dates which used 
to be so closely crowded in our schoolbooks — 
only a few feet apart; finally at Evora, where 
young chimpanzees are taken to board — for they 
die off everywhere else in Europe. "Salute these 
officers " ... At the words civilians bared their 
heads, and we took our hands out of our pockets 
in proof of innocence, like men who are nursing a 
concealed revolver. 

.... 7 8 .... 



Portuguese Days 

But the English general wanted to congratu- 
late your officers. He was the man who com- 
manded the British army at Tsing-Tao, and he 
had made a bet with Dobell of the Cameroons as 
to what English general would enter German ter- 
ritory first. Both got there the same day, at the 
same time; but ours was proclaimed the winner, 
because of the difference of latitude. Full of be- 
nevolence, eminently correct, he approached the 
Portuguese colonel and you were his interpreter. 

"Tell the colonel," he said, "that I thank him." 

"Colonel ..." you began in Portuguese, and 
you were off on a vast discourse where I gathered 
the most diverse words: the name of Rome, the 
name of London, the names of fruits, Christian 
names — for among your people, where there are 
only five family names, you adore Christian 
names. The colonel bowed low. 

"Major ..." he replied, and he too uttered 
a sentence full of abstract words; then another 
with the names of cities, French names this 
time; he got excited and flushed at the word 
"Joinville-sur-le-Pont." You nodded approval, 
and when he calmed down, and brought his 
speech to an end, you said, turning in our direc- 
tion: — 

.... 79 .... 



Portuguese Days 

"The colonel thanks you for your thanks." 
Thus the whole thing happened between us two, 
and you gave us back our amiable word after 
hugely inflating it, both of you, and squeezing it 
dry again. It is thus that we give back in our old 
age the little sentiments that were confided to us 
as children — give back, empty of all their mean- 
ing, the words that were love, pride, and friend- 
ship in our lives. 

Then we visited the barracks, where the higher 
officers looked happily at each other whenever a 
reservist had brought a lace pillow with him, or a 
horse had been named Zeppelin. Children fol- 
lowed us with the Lisbon papers, which had black 
borders when some French senator, Trouillot, or 
Naquet, had died the night before. You took 
advantage of the fact that your Portuguese 
tongue is word for word like my native Limousin, 
to teach me to read the sonnet that is published 
every day on the first page, and after that I knew 
how to say Ulysses in Limousin, and Agamemnon, 
and Desdemona. The road followed both the sea 
and the river, which was shut up in its aqueduct; 
or else it ran between high walls, pierced with 
acres of barred windows whose shutters the labor- 
ers opened to see us pass. From their balconies 
.... 80 ..- 



Portuguese Days 

the women talked with young men who lounged 
about in the middle of the street; they pronounced 
the s's without blurring them, and, after Spain, 
the sudden freedom and frankness of this letter 
was as poignant as if some pretension, some re- 
serve in the women themselves, had vanished 
away. 

On the half -useful days (so they call Saturdays) 
our automobiles had to crawl behind a long train 
of gossiping couples, for your country is the one 
in Europe where people move most; when we 
finally passed them I knew the last stick of their 
furniture, and you the least of their thoughts. All 
that I had had to imagine for myself when I was 
a schoolboy was here about us : archbishops' pal- 
aces with pink cupolas and gardens with false 
perspectives; nymphs whose breasts had been 
swollen by yearly coats of plaster; Indian corn 
filling the valleys; the enormous river drained by 
the ebb-tide, and purple between its porcelain 
dykes and its eucalyptus trees; the wood of 
bananas and cypresses with its allegories in 
faience — there was Poetry nursing her goose, 
Rhetoric who gave one a false welcome with her 
open arms and her crossed legs — and another 
wood with marble animals upon which Time, who 
.... 81 -. 



Portuguese Days 

had been enclosed there for a space, had inflicted 
all that the statues of Venus or Niobe endure from 
him: the dog was'headlessand pierced with arrows, 
the monkey had lost his arms, the rhinoceros had 
only a torso. Between the palms and the olives 
some gunners — to deceive I know not what 
pirate — were painting blue the lighthouse that 
had yesterday been red; and the trees were peo- 
pled, as one perceived from the warbling, by 
tropical birds that had escaped from the ships. 
All this brought me to the very point, to the most 
distant point where my childish longings had 
ever carried me, and I moved an inch or two 
nearer you, to avoid touching, especially with all 
this fresh paint upon it, one of the most intimate 
panels of my life. 



II 

The Grand Tour 



The Grand Tour 

i 

FROM THE VOSGES TO BELGIUM 

Ramonchamp, August 27, 1914. 
My battalion has been unfairly treated to-day. 
Our first stop has not been made in a town, and 
we thus miss all the others, for they are regularly 
spaced, an hour's march apart. These are towns 
where people do stop, nevertheless; they have 
casinos, and tourist offices, and we learn from 
marble tablets that Montaigne once halted at 
Bussang, and Talleyrand at Saint-Maurice. We 
might forgive the last two for being cleverer than 
we, but the second battalion's luck annoys us. 
It can buy at the grocer's shops — other regi- 
ments having already emptied them of supplies 
for adults — all the things that only children 
knew how to find in them before the war: nougat, 
raisins, and caramels. It drinks pale wine, eats 
cold trout, and takes the addresses of Lorraine 
families who will be its friends for life; this all the 
.... 85 ».. 



The Grand Tour 

way along a road that has given us only the mem- 
ory of a pair of round mountains, the very ones 
whose curves we timidly compared to the outlines 
of a young breast, in our narratives of the third- 
year classical course — it was our first metaphor, 
and the third-year modern class did not venture 
so far. 

From the moment when we emerged through 
our frontier tunnel, as through a spy-glass, into 
France again, the day after our triumphal de- 
parture from Thann, we lost all curiosity; we see 
nothing more. Captain Perret has shut up his 
guide-book. The country turns simple and green, 
and, save for the two summits on our left, still 
misty and symbolical, yields its other beauties 
candidly — its meadows, its brooks, and its gran- 
ite. Sometimes, glittering across a ploughed ex- 
panse, a solitary furrow. At last the men have 
packages of tobacco and need not crumble their 
cigarettes to fill their pipes; sometimes one of 
them stops at the edge of the road, and lights his 
pipe by taking a deep breath that sucks in his 
two cheeks, which makes him look as if he were 
silently laughing; and when he is grave again, 
surrounded by wreaths of smoke, goes back to his 
place. 

.... 2,6 -.. 



From the Vosges to Belgium 

France is a land of acquaintances. In the 
square at Saint-Maurice I catch sight of the 
house of old Haltesse, the commercial salesman of 
papier tf Arches whom we used to love to take to 
the Weber Restaurant, so as to call out his name 
and thus bewilder the waiters — they never, in 
their deference, dared call him anything but 
" Monseigneur." As we left le Thillot, there stood 
Madeleine Dollet, with whom I once lunched, 
and danced, and argued that Mozart was a 
Dutchman; she was distributing newspapers, the 
Petit Journal to the soldiers, the Matin to the ser- 
geants, the Figaro to the officers. When she heard 
an unknown soldier with spectacles and a mus- 
tache call out, "How goes it, Madeleine?" she 
must have looked herself all over, with her fine 
oval eyes, to see what could have given her name 
away. 

The letters on the fronts of the shops, which 
were a little weak-kneed and uncertain in Alsace, 
have now recovered their assurance. The French 
vowels, in their purity and loneliness, take then- 
places suitably between Roman consonants. In 
le Thillot the houses are numbered, and on the 
facade of each is nailed a blue enamel plaque with 
enormous Arabic numerals on it. Bardan, beside 

.... 8 7 ... 



The Grand Tour 

me, reads each name aloud, giving it a flattering 
emphasis when the proprietor is standing under it; 
similarly, in the country, he cannot resist apply- 
ing to every tree and bird the French word that 
hits it off best: — 

"Here is the green-finch of the brook. Here is 
the juniper of Ireland." 

Dear Bar dan, he clings to me nervously to-day; 
Bourbons from the South cannot hear their fears 
openly stated without turning faint. The people 
of Vichy or Gannat change countenance at the 
least hurt to their feelings; in one minute their 
souls are torn to bits — we have cruel sport with 
Bardan which would not go down with people 
from Moulin or Nevers. 

"We'll be back again in six months," we care- 
lessly remark. 

"In six months!" repeats Bardan, turning pale 
and tremulous. But he suddenly gets the point 
and in a flash is as blooming as ever. 

"Women are all unfaithful, horrible, ugly!" 

"Women?" repeats Bardan, who is married, 
and begins to stammer in his dismay. . . . 

Toward three o'clock, definite halt at Ramon- 
champ, in the middle of a vast amphitheater 

crossed by the Moselle, which is vainly trying 
.... %% .... 



From the Vosges to Belgium 

to separate the villas from the ordinary houses, 
and create Ramonchamp City and Ramonchamp 
Farms. The cemetery overlooks the river. From 
the tombs of the rich one gets the view, from the 
tombs of the poor one sees the station. The air 
is sharp and clear. Every dooryard has a gushing 
spring which flows down under the open sky to 
the Moselle — it is the houses, here, which supply 
the river with water. Every least trickle has worn 
the earth away to bed-rock; in this soil the biggest 
river could not reach a greater depth. We take 
a look at the church; the children are coming 
out of catechism, and shake hands with me, in 
the porch, one after the other; I feel obliged 
to stay till the very last one, like a holy- water 
font. 

Then, after dinner, I go up with Bardan to 
my company, which is quartered on an estate on 
the slope of the mountains. The sergeant-major 
counts our cartridges, and pays us eleven francs; 
as it is the end of the month we feel as if we had 
finished a war and were dividing the spoils. We 
come back under innumerable stars; in every 
farm, too, a light is twinkling, for we have been 
scattered over this plateau as the regiments that 
were to be changed into constellations used to be 

.... 8 9 .... 



The Grand Tour 

spread out in Hellas, after a victory. Bardan, 
moved by the night, has taken my arm, and re- 
fuses to believe that I may be killed. He dis- 
suades me from death as if it were suicide, or as 
if my being made a sacrificial offering for the 
regiment were in question this evening. He wants 
to hear me swear that I shall get through. Does 
the fact that I won't swear mean that I have a 
presentiment? I reassure him, touched myself, 
and promise to live a hundred years. But a senti- 
nel has fired in the distance, and he abuses the 
man as if he were aiming at me. 

In front of the town-hall, a group of soldiers 
with lanterns is reading the August communiques, 
copies of which the deputy-mayor has just 
brought. He is pasting them up himself in the 
proper order, listening to the comments of the 
soldiers, and explaining the names of Belgian 
cities according to an itinerary of his own in- 
vention: Brussels, 350 kilometers from Nancy; 
Louvain, 600 kilometers from Lyons; Malines, 
500 kilometers from Dijon. The men, tired out, 
undress themselves gradually as they read, beg 
the deputy to read aloud, and listen while rolling 
up their puttees, and folding their neckties. Some 
of them interrupt when the news is good, — when 
.... 90 •••• 



From the Vosges to Belgium 

Saarburg is taken, — others when the news is 
bad, and it is lost. Sometimes, when Alsace 
and Mulhouse are in question, they stop short, 
blinking at the proper names they know, and lis- 
ten as motionless as if they were already stripped 
for sleep or death. ... 

AugUSt 28, 2Q. 

Tryon lived in a great chateau, where he raised 
horses and dogs, and hunted the badger, and he 
was expecting a son next month. Viard had re- 
ceived a present of a desk of African mahogany 
on the eve of his departure for war. Trinqualet's 
brother, who worked in a tailoring establishment 
in Paris, was to spend his vacation in Auvergne, 
and dress the whole family for nothing. ... All 
my comrades are talking of their happiness to- 
day. Biset runs into a door as he brings in the 
report, but it is happiness all the same that gushes 
out of his huge skull, in the midst of his impreca- 
tions; he informs us that he is engaged. But the 
fellow who loses most in this affair is Sartaut, for 
he had just become heir to the most egotistic man 
in France — that is, to everything one needs to 
make one happy: a cellar with two bottles of 
every variety of wine, a garden where a monkey 
.... 9 i .... 



The Grand Tour 

and an antelope live peaceably together, and 
some shares in the P-L-M, which means that the 
Sartauts can travel free. As soon as the war is 
over, instead of living on the Ouest-fitat, they 
will establish themselves on the Brunoy line where 
they will see nothing but the trains that belong 
to them. 

We are encamped in the schoolhouse and are 
keeping school hours, as we keep factory hours in 
the workshops. Lunch at eleven o'clock, collation 
at four, and recreation in the courtyard. Captain 
Lambert writes his letters at the teacher's desk, 
and the rest of us squeeze with some difficulty 
into little desks soldered to their seats, pivoting 
with them to talk to each other, or to take the 
pupil's composition books out of their drawers. 
My schoolboy's name is Felix Bertrand, and judg- 
ing by his last exercise he is more likable than 
clear-headed; the class had to explain diminutives 
in on: chaton, negrillon, ourson; Felix, whose mind 
was wandering, did not understand what his 
teacher meant: " Un petit chaton est un chat" he 
explains; " un petit negrillon, un negre" Through 
the window we see the church, from which the 
spring of holy water is trickling, and see, too, 
everything that happens on the steep streets — a 
.... 92 ••■• 



From the Vosges to Belgium 

hard-boiled egg, for instance, rolling downhill with 
a squad in pursuit. ^ 

* * 

It is midnight. We are rumbling along in the 
train. The assistant station-master at le Thillot 
has shown me — before the colonel too — incom- 
prehensible attentions that I have found embar- 
rassing. He wanted to brush me, he tightened my 
straps, he offered me a first-class carriage. Very 
mysterious, for he called me sergeant all the while. 
It has done us this much good — that we are only 
six in a second-class carriage; Dollero, Clam, 
Danglade are already asleep, while I sit up with 
Devaux, who is preparing the return of effectives 
for to-morrow, and at every stop recopies the 
pages that I dictate. Outside the sky is black, 
but the stars are sharp, and the air clear. The 
railroad seems to be making a wide circle about 
the firmament itself, and the station signboards, 
lonely under the stars, present the most lying 
earth-names: Feldrupt, Rupt-sur-Moselle, Max- 
onchamp. I had always wanted to see Maxon- 
champ, but far from bringing me near it, this 
lunar station renders it inaccessible, for this life 

at least. So many stops that the return is ended 
.... 93 .... 



The Grand Tour 

well before Epinal. We have taken stock of the 
whole battalion; not a sleeping man in these fifty 
carriages whose name has not been spoken to- 
night. Humble names, litany of the regiment 
and of Auvergne. . . . We even take the trouble 
to search out Lieutenant Jourdan in his com- 
partment; he is new to the battalion and we 
found him still wide awake, smoking away, as 
if he had foreseen our doubt. 

fipinal. The turn-tables wake us up. It is 
light. The doors of the cars squeak open — some 
of them stick and we have to let out the men who 
are calling and banging inside. One car opens 
on to the fields, instead of on to the station, and 
one thinks for a moment that the world is still 
asleep. The night has left a white mark on every- 
thing that was blacker than itself, the roofs of 
the cars, the tarred signs. Each man parts his 
best friend's hair, and little mirrors are handed 
around with many precautions — the most pre- 
cious particles of the new day. Eyeglasses come 
out next, and the first keen look of the morning 
is for one's self. Some territorials are burning 
coffee at the corner of a shed, and the whole 
station smells of burnt coffee as the Place de 
l'Odeon does on Wednesdays. Dollero, cramped 
.... 94 .... 



From the Vosges to Belgium 

and uncertain in his mind after the night, gets 
astride an automatic turn-table, and to recover 
his balance, and right his poor fate, pushes it to- 
ward Remiremont, or Paris, or Basle. 

Long day in the train. We are going south by 
a strategical railway. Strategy draws its lines 
around mountains, thus avoiding tunnels, and 
goes up rivers to their sources to avoid bridges. 
We are ambling through a fat, green country 
where cattle and horses abound, and unknown 
animals, black striped with red, which the people 
of the region call lubards. We follow a lazy valley 
where the inhabitants have not been equal to 
thinking up names for their villages; a watering- 
place is called Baths, a port on the Saone, with 
many factories, is called Factory-Harbor; we pass 
Fair-Fountains, and By-the-Church in the dis- 
tance. Never any stations; our line is always 
isolated, and we see only the backs of the towns; 
whenever the strategists were unable to avoid a 
city, we go through it under full steam, blowing 
our whistle. 

Suddenly, however, the stations multiply, with 

their covered platforms which the P-L-M was 

painting black at the end of July; some of them — 

a bad mark for their old station-masters— had 
.... 95 .... 



The Grand Tour 

not got beyond the red coat on the day of mobili- 
zation. In the sidings, cars overflowing with all 
the things people were sending each other at four 
o'clock on the 31st of July: baby carriages, 
dynamos, and cement-trees. The commissary 
officers, to protect their white cap-bands from 
the cinders, have had them glazed with iron. 
Next Fretigny; after that Velle. Next, as if to 
cancel our own train, a train of soldiers which in- 
sists it is going to Thann, whence we have come. 
Then, overflowing with convoy, bristling with 
cannon that have been unmuzzled for the stop, 
appears Gray on its hill. The women and chil- 
dren, who are once more sitting all along the line, 
get up when the civilian trains go by to give them 
the letters which have been handed out to them 
from the military trains. Small boys catch our 
canteens on the fly, and we calmly cross the train- 
sheds, in the certainty that they will appear 
almost as quickly as ourselves at the other end, 
with the bottles full. The youngsters who special- 
ize in white wine beam with pride at our surprise. 
We go downstairs and at the doors, which are 
guarded by sentinels, the most inquisitive of the 
soldiers can see, fifteen feet away, the first row of 
the most inquisitive civilians. 

.... 96 ••- 



From the Vosges to Belgium 

Now the towns are turned in our direction. The 
soldiers are sitting on the edges of the open cars, 
and the train goes on real red legs. The bushes 
scratch our knees, or — in the districts where the 
state engineer takes good care of his hedges — 
caress them. The sun, like the smoke, unreason- 
ably changes sides, and we impatiently watch for 
the woods which will bring us shade. From Gray 
to Dijon again, the journey that we made by 
night three weeks ago; little girls whom we don't 
remember ever having seen recognize the regi- 
ment by its number, anxiously ask what has be- 
come of soldiers whose addresses they took, and 
reproach Bertet for having let his beard grow. 

We laugh and joke, as we did on our first jour- 
ney, without noticing that the women have 
changed; that some have grown thin, and some 
command while others obey. We, who have not 
seen a single dead man, are quite unaware that 
since we passed through last time the wounded 
have grown stiff in their arms, that their brothers 
don't write, that France is tottering, that a cav- 
alryman in a sudden fit of madness has gone after 
them with a revolver — none of this do we realize ; 
we throw them kisses, and make game of the red- 
haired ones, and the fat ones, and the little girls 
.... 97 .... 



The Grand Tour 

who squint. They take what is ignorance on our 
part for courage; they gaze at us admiringly, and 
it is always the girl who is crying who lets herself 
be kissed. . . . 

After passing between silent mountains, encir- 
cled by aqueducts, and then between a vast se- 
ries of embankments spotted with vine-stocks, we 
come upon Dijon, each one of her many hills 
crowned with an urban diadem. The sun floods 
our convoy with the same rays that are baking the 
grapes. We draw into the station, but are caught 
in the train-shed between an ambulance and a 
cavalry train, both of them crammed to over- 
flowing, and cannot communicate with the active 
inhabitants of Dijon except through a wounded 
man, or an indolent spahi. One of the wounded 
comes from our regiment in active service and 
we at last get news of our juniors: they have been 
in Lorraine, and have had to deploy in the poly- 
gon of Saarburg itself; the German cannon had 
every point located, but the exercise trenches 
were luckily excellent. He refers to the dead by 
their nicknames; l'Aigu is killed, Mimi is killed, 
and we turn to our officer to translate this news, 
bringing the poor bodies back into their parade 
names : Delaberque is killed, Martineau is killed — 

.... 9 s .... 



From the Vosges to Belgium 

for some of them we sharpen the proper names 
into a first name: Jean is killed, Albert is killed. 
The men all begin to talk of what each one was 
doing the last time they saw him: he was de- 
vouring a large slice of ham, he was with Juliette, 
he was asleep. The fellow who saw him eating 
understands even less than the other two. 

When we leave, night has come on. The peas- 
ant who in the old days used to shut up the farm- 
yard gate goes to bed last, and pushes to our 
heavy doors. We are on the main line where 
there are no jolts, the line on which even invalids 
and millionaires on their way back from Nice can 
drowse in peace. At Laroche and Fontainebleau 
the Dames de France, already — and eternally — 
accustomed to the wounded, wake us and look 
after us as if we were mutilated; it alarms them 
to see us jump out of the cars, and they hold our 
glasses while we drink, and take our hands and 
assure us that we have no fever. Then, at four in 
the morning, from a viaduct, I recognize at the 
terminal of the tramway which starts from the 
Louvre, the village where the Museum care- 
takers live. Over every door hangs a plaster cast 
of the Venus of Milo, or the Neapolitan fisher- 
boy. There is Diane de Poitiers — Paris at last! 
•'- 99 ■■■• 



The Grand Tour 

But it is only Rosny, Nogent, Noisy. We circle 
about them and Paris defends herself against me 
with all her forts. We are not to enter the city; 
we are to submit to the will of those rival general 
staffs which are amusing themselves with making 
the best tangent on Paris with our trains, and I 
only venture to think of half -forgotten faces from 
Carrieres or Pantin — the friends of my friends. 
Some old territorials tell us — but they don't 
blame us for it — that our train has run over one 
of them at Saint-Maur, and thus give us as early 
as daybreak the impression that every provincial 
has the night of his arrival in Paris — an impres- 
sion of death and destruction. My companions 
wake up. They look out to the right and admire 
the Church of the Sacred Heart on its mountain, 
and ten minutes later, on the left, admire a gi- 
gantic marble monument with five cupolas; still, 
though I dare n't admit it, the Sacred Heart. 

All the inhabitants have transported the fronts 
of their houses to the edge of the railroad, their 
flags, too, and their curtains, and any other tro- 
phies which in time of peace had been born of a 
former war. It is a northern exposure, but never 
mind — the housewives will face north with their 
sewing after this. The photographers have hung 
.... IO o •••• 



From the Vosges to Belgium 

out streamers with portraits of William with two 
green electric lights for eyes, and turn on the cur- 
rent, although the arrangement is intended for 
troops going by at night. In one dooryard a little 
old man in a fencing-coat is making a bayonet- 
charge on a dummy topped by a helmet. The 
wife of a tailor, perched on a sky-blue roof, points 
out her humble spouse, shouting that he is off 
to-morrow. A baker retards his bedtime on our 
account, and as a reward sees his children get up 
in their morning freshness for the first time in 
his life. In the usual places where the race-trains 
used to stop, for no apparent reason, we stop, too, 
and the passengers of the trains inbound for Paris 
toss us their unread newspapers, which are carried 
on the wind from one car to the next, gathered in, 
and thrown out again. 

At the grade-crossings the children inform us 
sadly that there is nothing but bottled wine left 
at the inn, and leap with joy to see us rich. The 
children at the junctions are spoiled; they demand 
swords and helmets, and accept with a bad grace 
— it is true that the pour-boire is too humble for 
so great a war — our German nickel sous. A 
black-bearded motorist, whom we suspected of 
being a spy, orders a hundred bottles of wine for 

.... I0 I .-.. 



The Grand Tour 

us from the nearest inn; we had taken generosity 
for hypocrisy because they wear the same mask. 
Finally, the bold suburbs turn their very faces 
to us; we see the fronts of the town-halls, the 
churches stand perpendicular to the railroad, we 
cross the public squares, and hear from loquacious 
suburbans all the stories that were passed about 
on the day of mobilization; the child with the 
wooden gun, the Senegalese with heads in their 
knapsacks, the wounded Prussian slapping his 
captured general in the face. No more trains for 
Paris; all the traffic now goes round the city. 

At Beaumont, information about our journey: 
the regiment is ordered to stop some dozens of 
armored German motor-cars which have pierced 
our lines. At Creil, English hospital train. The 
wounded drink all the Kirsch we have left from 
Alsace. 

"Brandy!" they cogently remark, wiping their 
mouths with their bare arms. 

"No!" we answer: "Kirsch — quetsch!" 

"Yes," they repeat, "brandy." 

Toward three o'clock, sudden stop. The bugles 

blow. The train can go no farther, and as there is 

no turn-table turn, must back off, head on to the 

enemy. The sun is oppressive, the exhausted 

.... 102 •••• 



From the Vosges to Belgium 

earth destroys our vision of a safe, round globe, 
and all the shadow on the plain is heaped in 
square patches, on its farther edge, one to each 
little wood of black pines. The cannon are boom- 
ing with those sullen reports that exhaust the air, 
and in the heart set some ghostly needle to spin- 
ning. We listlessly fall into line, each company 
so remote from the next that for quite an hour 
armored motor-cars could safely have dashed 
through the spaces between. 



II 

WAR CURRENTS ON THE HIGH ROAD 

Ansauvillers, August 30. 
We are received with open arms. The inhabitants 
had heard that the towns near by were occupied 
last night, and thought they had been abandoned. 
They have organized the essentials for a siege: a 
home guard and a fire brigade. The same old vet- 
erans command the two companies, and all may 
yet go well if fire and panic do not break out 
together. The officials insist on our taking up 
our quarters in the town — let the outposts look 
out for themselves. It is not general protection 
Ansauvillers wants, but an individual guard, a 
squad, a soldier, a gun for every house and fam- 
ily. They treat us as guests, preparing hot water 
and soap for us, and carrying our packs about 
by the top straps, like valises. The hairdresser 
shaves all those who are quartered in his group of 
houses for nothing, and charges the others — 
extra protectors — two sous. In front of every 
house is set out a table with pens and ink ; for the 
.... I0 4 .... 



War Currents on the High Road 

first time since the war began we have leisure to 
answer friends to whom we have owed letters left 
over from days of peace. To our relatives we send 
telegrams, as the service is still uninterrupted, 
and those of us who come from Paris confide some 
missives to a motorist who will deliver them this 
very evening. 

Little by little, once my letters and telegrams 
have got off, the idea of the telephone comes to 
me, as naturally as it came to Edison himself, 
and my host is ready to risk the adventure, for 
he has a telephone and is the mayor besides. We 
reach Paris by the broken line of his important 
connections, getting Pontoise from his prefect, 
and Paris Central from his Pontoise senator. At 
last the Government office where my friends are. 
Here is Solis — this is luck, for he is the man in the 
office who is easiest to understand over the tele- 
phone; an official with literary tastes telephones 
him for pleasure every morning, to talk of Paul 
Hervieu. He might keep the people round him 
quiet — what a racket! — my cannon has hushed 
its noise. 

Suddenly he understands, calls out to his col- 
leagues to be still, and I seem to see him turning 
toward the garden and the open window with 
.... 105 •••• 



The Grand Tour 

his receiver, to get the full flavor of telephoning 
to the front. 

"Ah, my dear fellow, where are you?" 

"Not far from Guise." 

But the name is too bold and sibilant. The 
senator and the prefect, who were holding the 
wire, vanish. We are cut off. Nothing more. 

Night has come on. The maid insists on black- 
ing our boots, and lends us some of the mayor's 
old slippers. We stretch out on the elaborate 
grass-plot in front of the villa where, to reach 
their chosen official, all the electors must make 
the circuit of an enormous heart cut in the turf. 

Sunday, August 31. 
On a bicycle so new and sparkling that they 
are searching heaven for a halo of the same make, 
a fair-haired girl, emerging like an apparition 
from the green fields, rolls by us, only to dismount 
abruptly and faint away. I support her; her eyes 
are wide open, her heart is beating. Unconscious 
of the chaff of my comrades, who suggest that I 
must be on the point of marriage, she relaxes and 
clings to me. But I suddenly feel her weight, and 
she blushingly frees herself, explaining that she 
has only known how to dismount since yesterday. 
.... I0 6 •••• 



War Currents on the High Road 

She begs us to help her get on again; we give her 
a push, and she is off, but we can tell by the wob- 
bling of the machine that she would like to turn 
her head to give us an uncertain good-bye smile. 

Two more cyclists. The man has set a child on 
his handle-bars, the woman pedals along under 
a load of bundles; the child is crying because 
he wants to face his father, instead of looking at 
the road. The man asks us the way to Noailles ; 
the woman, who cannot dissimulate, the way to 
Rouen. I am just going to find out, when they 
hurry after a passing group of cyclists; the crying 
child acts as a horn — his plaintive voice flows 
on like a German ballad. The constable has come 
to join us, in a temper. 

"Those are refugees! " he tells us. 

Toward eleven o'clock, while the real inhabit- 
ants, beloved of God, are at mass, the town is all 
of a sudden sprinkled with motor-cycles, dog- 
carts, and trucks which take breath for a moment 
and start on again as soon as another motor-cycle, 
or light cart, or heavy wagon passes; for they want 
no friends but those who go at their own speed. 
It takes a very united family for the cyclists to 
accommodate their pace to the horses'. The con- 
stable stops them when they take the wrong turn. 
.... joy .... 



The Grand Tour 

"Straight ahead," he commands. 

We, too, blame them for spreading fear on such 
a peaceful Sunday, in a town where the firemen, 
in uniform, have just given a rehearsal on their 
scaffolding of a fire thirty feet high. Soon the 
whole place is crowded, for the sentries at the 
northern post are letting everybody in, whereas 
at the southern one they demand passports. Some 
of the refugees stop, too, for joy in at last finding, 
in the midst of the terrified districts, this town 
steeped in sun and peace, and ask if there is an 
hotel. They come from the north; those from the 
big cities, like Turcoing and Lille, are heading for 
other big towns, for Beauvais or Rouen; those 
from the villages are going toward minute villages 
that we have never heard of; every one seeks 
refuge in the name of a town about the same size 
as his own. 

"And your houses," asks the constable, "and 
your things?" 

They have locked the doors. 

"And the Prussians? You've seen them?" 

Not they. But a cyclist who is with them. He 
won't be long in coming by; he is always one vil- 
lage late, for he 's a great talker and people treat 
him to drinks. 

.... 108 •••• 



' War Currents on the High Road 

Not many peasants so far; all these people 
lived in houses on the road, and had only to cross 
their thresholds to be exiles. As yet no animals, 
no flocks to give the procession the fatal but sure 
pace of a migration. No local costumes; it's as 
if they were emigrating by professions. One has 
only to say, at the sight of a coat with an aca- 
demic button, or a blouse spattered with paint: — 

" There goes the schoolmaster, there goes the 
wheelwright, or maybe the painter." 

Immense wagons loaded with children, whose 
couch of hay the appetites of the team diminish 
at every stop. In covered hay-carts, great- 
grandmothers with their great-granddaughters — 
the boys have slipped out through the slats; a 
family dragging its mattresses on wheelbarrows, 
as ants drag their eggs; an ox-cart that holds a 
family from Douai, and a visiting family from 
Paris — distant cousins who remain ceremonious, 
guests even in misfortune, and bring all their lug- 
gage with them, while their hosts, for lack of 
room, have left everything behind. 

Now the refugees are passing quickly through 

our jeering town — all but the poor, confused 

families who know nobody in France, stop at the 

least look, answer that they are going straight 

.... IC >9 ... 



The Grand Tour 

ahead, and tremble if you tell them that that 
is n't the right way. Some of the mothers ask for 
milk, drink it, and kiss their babies with lips wet 
with cream. Four women ask our help; for their 
horse, wheezing and trembling, has fallen down 
and refuses to budge; it takes eight men, just 
twice their number, to pry up bis hoofs and set 
him on his feet again. ... So the feeble procession 
goes on: those who are no good for war are in 
command; hunchbacks, or great lazy louts, the 
sort who would have the goitre, if this were a 
mountain region. 

They all carry, either in cages or on leash, the 
animals which make the best fugitives: dogs, 
canaries, cats. In every carriage, too, is the object 
that would have been saved in case of fire, or else 
— to-day a bond of union — the one that would 
have been quarreled over in a division of property; 
a card-table, suspended like a goat with its feet 
tied together, or a phonograph. Now comes a 
hair-dresser with his waxen heads. Now some poor 
old people with their fixed attachments — an old 
woman in her armchair, an old man on his camp- 
stool. Some fresh, plump women in waterproofs, 
who have taken time to slip on their best chemises, 
but not to tie up the pink ribbons, which flutter 
.... II0 ... 



War Currents on the High Road 

in the breeze. Sometimes, a more processional 
series of vehicles drawn by donkeys, mules, and 
horses in due order, as if to herald Reason and 
the Queen of the day. A real moving- van, heaped 
with mattresses, and followed tenaciously by 
some families on foot, who are hoping that the 
mover will lend them a tick of straw when night 
comes. Haggard faces of those who have lost 
a precious piece of furniture, or a relative, or a 
pocket-book, and who, ever since they started, 
have walked forward under the temptation to 
turn back again. Bardan begins to feel upset, 
especially as he discovers a resemblance to his 
family on every face. Here is his sister's double; 
here is his aunt — she has a dress just like that. 
Only a tall, dark girl seems new to him from every 
point of view, and he stops talking, suddenly 
aware of the incompleteness of his family. 

But now appear some fugitives whom the con- 
stable recognizes, families from quite close by, 
who evidently feel it more respectable to be leav- 
ing on a Sunday than on a week-day. The wind 
has risen, and the villages round Ansauvillers on 
which neither cannon nor regiments have been 
placed are beginning to flutter, and blow away. 

First the Pintau family from Breteuil, then the 
.... IIX .... 



The Grand Tour 

Durandons from Barlier; the constable looks 
scared when he recognizes them, and realizes, 
too, that those who are leaving are not, as he 
supposed, the most hypocritical or the most av- 
aricious. The Pintaus were goodness itself; they 
pay their stable bill in advance. All the same, 
those who used to wear the war-medals of 1870 
have taken them off. 

At noon our bugles sound the general alarm. 
The inhabitants don't feel worried; they tell 
themselves that if they had artillery quartered 
upon them a cannon might be fired at midday. 
But the companies get ready and fall into line; 
they see the convoy forming ... we start off. The 
people of the town who first understand want to 
link their fate with the regiment's, and scramble 
up on to the company vehicles with bundles of 
clothes, and food, which they hand out to the 
drivers in the hope of winning them over. But 
the colonel has every seat cleared, and the drivers 
woefully give back the biscuits — one by one, as 
the packages have broken in their pockets. To 
clear the road the refugees have taken our places 
in the stables and courtyards, and learn from us 
the proper way to leave. The order was so sud- 
den that I did not say good-bye to the constable. 
.... 112 .... 



War Currents on the High Road 

We are going north. Ten miles of discussion 
with Lieutenant Bertet, who does not care for this 
departure toward Lille; we are not making the 
same sort of war, he and I; he wants to see only 
the regions he knows and I only those I don't 
know. . . . Suddenly, great excitement. A group 
of chasseurs on bicycles are waving their caps 
from some high ground at the corner of a park. 
They jump on their wheels and rush down upon 
us, bearing hard on their pedals. 

"Bravo," they yell, "bravo!" 

What have we done now? They decipher and 
applaud the number of the regiment. What would 
they say if they knew it was the old regiment of 
Dupre, the champion cyclist of France! 

"Are there many of you?" 

We are a division, and when they hear that we 
have some Maroccans with us their joy increases, 
like the joy of children who have gone to meet 
their uncle the explorer, and see him getting out 
of the train with a negro. For two weeks our 
cyclists have not known what an infantryman 
looks like. Every night they are promised some, 
but it is always cavalry who arrive in the morn- 
ing; riders still more tired than themselves, who 
come from farther north, and try hard to take 
.... II3 .... 



The Grand Tour 

them, the cyclists, for the longed-for infantry. 

The road now begins to fill up with cuirassiers 
and scattered dragoons who shake hands with us; 
once we have reached the wall of the park, as far 
as the eye can reach along the valley lies their 
immense snake-like length, wriggling with curi- 
osity and satisfaction — with certain fixed points, 
however, which are the neighborhood of the 
colonels; three whole divisions winding between 
us and this invisible enemy. 

We have lengthened our step, and are march- 
ing as close to them as we can. They expected us 
a little earlier, at three o'clock, and it's six, but 
they have taken advantage of this respite to make 
their toilets. Even the laziest of them have 
washed themselves, and trimmed their beards. 
They are in fine form, and in exchange for our 
chocolate and gingerbread they offer us the less 
prosaic things they were using — razors, soap- 
balls, cosmetics. A brigadier douses me with 
eau-de-cologne, others follow his example, and 
we make our second entry into the war under 
atomizers. But we have orders to separate, and 
cross the ditch to the field on the other side. 
Along the furrows, the heavy tread of the com- 
panies has become a flowing and active march ; the 
.... II4 .... 



War Currents on the High Road 

cavalry admire us, and, so far as marching goes, 
we are beginning in fact to know how to do it. 

Evening has come on. Under cover of the dark 
the regiment has got so thoroughly mixed up with 
the Cambrai Cuirassiers that they give up trying 
to separate them. In Tartigny, I sleep under a 
covered wagon in the court of the chateau, near 
Drouin, a cavalryman of the first class, who 
offers me the hay he has prepared for the night. 
I can stretch out on it in comfort; he is a six- 
footer. 

Cold night. Drouin makes light of the cold — 
he makes fun of everything. He is a workman at 
Lille, and does not believe in fate. 



Ill 

VIGIL NEAR PARIS 

Thursday, September 3. 
At six o'clock we leave Fosseuse. Once we have 
passed the park wall, we are in the suburbs. At 
every bend in the road rival automobile tires 
point out the distance to Paris, the French tires 
calculating it from Notre-Dame, the American 
tires from the Opera. Fields, but all below em- 
bankments; the fine surface loam has been sold 
for the Luxembourg or the Tuileries. Here is the 
point where the country road strikes a vein of 
cement and macadam, the front line of brokers' 
excursions, the farthest reach for taxis, the goal 
of the efforts and the renown of bicycle racers 
and cafe concert actors. Here, too, are the enor- 
mous piers to which they attach the tents that 
are pitched above Paris on big circus days. The 
last gas-jets fed by Paris are still burning, and 
one sees, projecting into the daylight, all that the 
city keeps underground: lead conduits, tramway 
terminals and bumpers. 
On squares framed in elms, miniature statues 
.... u6 .- 



Vigil near Paris 

of Cupids or dolphins occupy spots that will some 
day be filled by the famous sons whom the newly 
rich will engender. Here the town-hall, where 
Mounet recites in monologue on Sundays the part 
he is to play at the Francais the following week; 
there the fifty-kilometer limit beyond which those 
who are banished from Paris must five — if they 
listen attentively they need not lose a single one 
of his verses. Haystacks haunted by tramps in 
bowler hats. In the streets, dogs that have 
scarcely evolved from the luxury of Paris, and 
whose hinder parts are Russian or Pomeranian. 
Along the highroad, factories of Belgian brillian- 
tine, adhesive gilt, liquid iron — everything that 
gives a sheen or polish. Bergeot guesses from the 
look of them what Paris must be like. Here is 
Chambly, where the Uhlans, who do not care for 
adventures with escaped lions, will be put to 
flight by the belling of the stags in the park. 
Lucky infantrymen; they will never know that to 
go back to Paris by train means going back to 
confusion, to personal egotism; here the inhabi- 
tants are more and more generous, as if it were 
for their good-will that they had been banished 
to a distance of twenty or thirty kilometers. 

Cider turns to wine, and wine to vermouth as 
.... II7 .... 



The Grand Tour 

we get nearer, and the bar-tenders, who have 
modestly stopped their phonographs, are trying 
to talk themselves. The road has become a river; 
we are following the Oise. At the base of every 
factory chimney stand the oldest of the workmen 
who once built it — gathered there now to tear it 
down, yet holding their pondering heads higher 
than the most learned philosophers. By every 
bridge and viaduct is an officer of the Engineer 
Corps, armed with a white-plastered lath, as the 
overseer of houses that are being repaired stands 
guard on a Paris sidewalk. In Champagne the 
population decides to accompany us, and accepts 
our help. We carry pasteboard hat-boxes which 
are heavier than if they were loaded with car- 
tridges; we push baby-carriages full of bronzes 
and strong-boxes. The lightest objects have 
turned fearfully heavy, as they do in dreams, and 
when an overcoat is dropped you hear a metallic 
or a silvery ring. At the villas, the care-takers are 
hastily plucking electric-light bulbs or early 
peaches, according as their masters took pride in 
their parlors or their gardens. Gentlemen of 
means, who had been occupied the night before in 
installing their billiard-rooms on the Oise, are 
moving out, along with their new cues, their 
.... n8 .... 



Vigil near Paris 

exotic furniture, their Arabian stools, their Cash- 
mere shawls, and their parokeets; as if every 
house found with a non-French article in it were 
going to be burned down. A little boy, who is 
walking near us all by himself, encourages us to 
think him an orphan; when suddenly discovered 
by his aunts, his mother, his sisters, and his 
grandmothers, he does not know where to look, 
and hurries away very red in the face. A long 
pause in Parmain; the refugees wait half an hour 
because they prefer to stay with us, but they get 
tired of it, and apologetically start on alone. 

They are right; as soon as we reach the forest 
of PIsle-Adam, our march becomes uncertain. 
Orders turn us first north, then south; we feel as 
if a great general staff, somewhere in our rear, 
were constantly digging up our magnetic pole and 
burying it again the next minute. At Baillet, 
the commandant gives us the news that the Ger- 
mans have passed the Oise at Senlis and are upon 
us. We deploy, as we suppose, not knowing that 
the Oise does n't go through Senlis and that all 
one can cross there is the Nonette. 

* * 
.... 119 .... 



The Grand Tour 

We are hidden in the bed of a little brook, with 
no water and many nettles in it. Not a move- 
ment but costs us a prick and a red blotch. 
Brambles, too, and thistles, all the cross-grained 
plants that the big newspapers have since de- 
clared edible. Night has come on, and we are 
shivering. We close up toward Ecouen, putting 
out our fires, but carrying burning sticks in our 
hands on the chance of their being needed again 
directly. This is the first trench where the sub- 
alterns snub the soldiers who dig seats or — pro- 
phetically — loopholes for themselves, and where 
the regiment, after deploying, presents a line a 
few inches thick to the Germans. We remain 
standing, our left resting on the Moiselles Church, 
and the soldiers who go by us shake hands — as 
one does at a funeral — with those whom they 
recognize in this interminable family. The men 
discuss the distance to Paris: the most chilly 
cut it down to fifteen or twenty kilometers, while 
those who have never seen it calculate in 
miles. 

We are silent. From time to time a raucous 

cough indicates the most unhealthy hollow in the 

ditch, or the soldier who would be the first to die 

in time of peace. The true sound of the brook is 
.... 120 . r: . 



Vigil near Paris 

given, a hundred yards behind it, by the soughing 
of some immense poplar- trees; while the sound of 
the regiment is imitated by fleeing civilians whose 
vehicles are rolling by on the road. When we 
yawn we feel as if we had uttered a yell that could 
be heard the other side of ficouen a few seconds 
afterward. Some of our drowsy comrades all at 
once take on an energetic, wide-awake air; the 
fact is they have suddenly decided to open their 
last can of food, at the next stop; or death has 
suddenly ceased to frighten them; or they have 
renounced ever drinking any more bordeaux, or 
catching any more trout. 

Sometimes we go off on patrol, following up the 
edge of the brook. Shadows that have escaped 
from the nettles jump into the ditch at the sound 
of our footsteps; weary horses, whose heads droop 
lower and lower, are suddenly startled awake by 
the touch of the earth on their nostrils. Motion- 
less groups — officers; the more stripes they have, 
the more remote are they from the brook, and 
the less completely lost in the mist. The colonel 
over there stands out quite plain, the regiment's 
only mind. 

Next we begin to climb, advancing across those 
concentric highways which do not allow timid pro- 

... 121 •<•• 



The Grand Tour 

vincials to reach Paris until they have ten times 
circled around it. Sometimes we look for Ger- 
mans, as one hunts for spirits, in the sky, over- 
head, on the horizon; sometimes we look for 
them like a stray bit of game in a tuft of holly, 
or under a harrow with an awning stretched over 
it. We lose ourselves, for the trenches to-night 
are too far away, and the zone with no master is 
five miles wide. 

There are no disputes. We are no longer living 
one of those many days when the humor and the 
movements of the regiment were so disorderly 
that one could explain them better by any other 
theory than that of war. In the midst of these 
nettles which keep us so wide awake, we feel our- 
selves to be useful, and as we are coming up the 
river, up the Seine itself, the rumor spreads that 
we are protecting Paris. Sartaut protects it in 
the manner of a man who lives there, turning his 
back on it completely, but throwing his cigarette 
in front of the ditch, not behind — not inside the 
walls; Bardier, a commercial traveler who has 
once been through, protects it by sharply asking 
Sartaut to confirm him that one can go from the 
rue Beaubourg into the rue Saint-Denis. Maps 
are handed about, and we scratch matches to 

.... I2 2 •••• 



Vigil near Paris 

study the plan of Paris, which is easy to under- 
stand and just fits into these kindly brains. 

A gentle pressure which has no doubt emanated 
from the city keeps all these eyes half alight, half 
dreamy. It is midnight. We imagine Paris ever 
so peaceful, strewn with our sleeping comrades. 
Under every roof we lift we see our beloved, 
stretched out in her white slumber. We see in 
their beds even those whom we never had to 
think of as lying down, and whom we never met 
save at high noon at Laveur's Restaurant. We 
have no idea that the Louvre is already empty, 
and the Pantheon too; that a train full of statues 
is starting for Toulouse between two trains full of 
archives — to break any possible shock; nor that 
the astronomers of the Observatoire are taking 
to pieces and burying the lenses that served on 
our globe; nor that they are hoisting cannons up 
on to Montmartre to balance the rive gauche, with 
its overcrowded stations. We see in their beds 
even the rag-pickers, those rancid night-lamps; 
we feel that the trained nurses are dozing, and the 
idea of bakers, by good luck, does n't come to us. 

It is three o'clock and bitterly cold. The colo- 
nel's horse sadly watches the orderly burning his 
hay. 

.... 123 •••■ 



The Grand Tour 

Luzarches, Friday the 4th. 
Dinner in an arbor with Juliette, the house- 
keeper, who at the age of thirty already had her 
fourteen daughters, but none of whose sons-in- 
law has succeeded in producing a child. She has 
no hope save in war to change this situation. A 
few hours ago she held in her arms our friend, 
Saint-Genix, who had been killed by the Uhlans 
while on patrol, and refused to give up the body, 
in spite of their revolvers. She is arranging a 
dormitory in the attic where eight of us can sleep 
— that 's just what she always wanted, eight 
sons! — and helps us play tricks on each other: 
apple-pie beds, heavy weights under the blankets. 
She grieves because she has no sawdust to add to 
the discomfort. 

Saturday, the 5th. 
Alarm at four o'clock. I go to the park to wake 
the horses. They were really lying down, and get 
up. For some reason I thought La Fontaine had 
lived in Luzarches, and this walk gives me all 
the memories that the English take home from 
Chateau-Thierry. The little animals I meet — 
hedgehogs, carp, skunks — move gently and 
.... 124 •••• 



Vigil near Paris 

sedately for me — as they do in fables — toward 
some tender moral; some pheasants, a Japanese 
cock, some gold-fish make me conceive a more 
vain and picturesque La Fontaine. Glorious cold 
weather; it is the hour when the leaves to which 
midnight has been fatal are falling; a torpid sun 
is disentangling its rays one by one, as a trireme 
might its oars. Under the leadership of the rab- 
bits and the ants all the small consolations of life 
come back to me in this dawn — modest but 
vastly consoling against Germany, where the least 
fable, from Grimm to Lessing, requisitions nothing 
less than an elephant or a dromedary to carry its 
moral. 

We are going straight east. We traverse those 
ugly barren towns to the north of Paris which 
wear the same names as the flowery towns to the 
south; Marly, Fontenay. We graze Mareil-en- 
France, Chatenay-en-France, whose muddy soil 
sticks to everything that goes through. We are 
striking across country, and when we occasionally 
hit a bit of road the company has hard work to 
keep its balance. The general undoubtedly wants 
to air his brigade; not a formation that he does 
not command by twos, or single file, or battalions; 
not. a soldier in mid-ranks but reaches the edge at 
125 •- 



The Grand Tour 

least once to take his share of air and country. 
The march does not yield much for our journals, 
because our memories, for a month past, have 
been no more than the ribbon of the highways, 
and are no wider than telegraph- tickers; I should 
remember nothing about this day if all the memo- 
ries of the preceding days which had lost their 
places had not — because it is the last one — 
taken refuge there in spite of me: the woman 
swimming in the river; the child who boasted that 
he had stopped obeying since the war — he went 
to buy us milk, and eggs, and wine, and we proved, 
to his confusion, that he had obeyed three times, 
even if all the eggs were counted as one. 

From midday on, as far as the eye can reach, 
lines of new troops, parallel to the regiment on 
this flat ground, are copying all our movements; 
obliquing if we oblique, and when we march single 
file tapering out to show us that they, too, are 
made up of separate men. From time to time the 
ambulances take advantage of one of our halts 
to defile beside us, with their processions of 
negroes, Moroccans, and white horses — only the 
god of physic himself is lacking. Sometimes, as it 
debouches from a wood, a troop we had supposed 
numerous ends abruptly, like Hannibal's army in 
.... 126 •••• 



Vigil near Paris 

the "movies." When we rest, instead of distrac- 
tions bounded by the highway, there are games in 
which the whole regiment takes part; a football 
game in which a zouave's Chechia, stuffed with 
paper, is tossed from battalion to battalion; a 
race on the horses which have been forgotten in 
the Marly stud. Field-mice slip from under our 
feet, and lady-bugs and rats — all the little crea- 
tures that live where the general staff's map is 
blank. 

On our right, the Moroccans. On our left a 
brand-new regiment which one realizes must just 
have been formed, so similar are its officers, its 
men, and its uniforms. Every one of our com- 
panies, on the contrary, now has personages 
and protagonists who stand out so sharply from 
the ranks that it seems as if battle and war must 
be engaged between them. After these long 
weeks of marching, we reach the fighting with 
positions fixed by the degree of our strength or 
our weariness; the most courageous seem nearer 
war than the others, and in spite of ourselves it 
is from among them that we choose our first dead. 
On these faces which were alike a month ago 
everything death can aim at has become visible; 

and every one of our seven captains has revealed 
.... I27 .... 



The Grand Tour 

his virtues or his peculiarities to us, as the secret 
of which he must die: they might be photo- 
graphed, for they will never change again. Here 
is Flamond, who is to die in his greatcoat, and 
already carries it folded on his arm. There Per- 
rin, with the eyeglass that is to save him on 
Tuesday dangling on his chest; he pinches it 
below the forehead that will be bored through 
on Wednesday. Yonder Major Gerard, a philo- 
sophic old bachelor whom the colonel did not 
care for because he did not believe in the external 
world; he must have made with each sergeant 
the wager Pascal made with God, for he shares 
his sweet biscuit with me, and talks with me as 
if I never had to die. Over there Captain Perret, 
who knows everything. Not an officer's face but 
seems a target now, and it is in their heads that 
we see them all wounded. 

Moussy-le-Vieux — a little town which the 
English occupied yesterday before obliquing on 
Meaux. The regiment has difficulty in making 
itself comfortable in the tracks they have left: the 
wash-boilers have this time been used to cook, 
not the soup but the washing; the stables have 
sheltered the carriages, while the horses camped 
outside; they had taken out all the beds and slept 
.... I2 8 •.. 



Vigil near Paris 

in the open air. We had to do over the village, as 
one does over a room in the provinces after the 
departure of a colonial friend. We live in a 
hunting-box built of brick and slate, with the 
ambulance of the division. The cannonading to 
the east is so violent and so near that the win- 
dows are rattling. We expect the alarm any mo- 
ment, and repair our knapsacks and guns with the 
help of the ambulance men, who give us cotton 
plugs for our triggers, and castor oil for our ma- 
chine guns; for, egoists that men are, the best 
remedies remain those that they have found for 
themselves. 

Night. ... On the first floor the officers climb 
into the beds that were maltreated yesterday; 
they are annoyed by the rocking, displeased to 
have their heads low and their feet high, and to 
toss on lumpy mattresses on the eve of the Marne. 
But I, whom chance protects, stretch out on the 
ground-floor on the most perfect level; I go to 
sleep on a billiard-table. 



IV 

FIRST DEAD 

Sunday, the 6th. 
Careful not to stumble over the rows of sleeping 
bodies, seeking a foothold between them like 
some too timorous conqueror of old, the night 
watch of the brigade advances to the billiard- 
table where I lie. I read the order: — 

" For the colonel. Immediate departure direc- 
tion Dammartin. Warn the ambulance." 

We get even by waking all the orderlies and 
doctors first, and I go up to knock at the door of 
the colonel, who has lain down all dressed. 

"What time?" 

"Two minutes of twelve." 

I hear him hurriedly getting up so as to be 
ready at exactly midnight. I make the tour of the 
floor, knocking at all the doors. Captain Lambert 
intends to ask me the time and asks the day. 

"Sunday." 

The waking words of all the captains, doctors, 
and commissaries of the brigade, the first words 
that they murmured on the day of the battle, I 
.... 130 ■•-. 



First Dead 

pick up one by one. Dr. Mallet calls, "Good! 
very good!" Lieutenant Bertet, who had gone 
to bed naked, despairs of ever being ready, and 
as soon as he gets his shirt on goes back again. 
An unknown officer replies with his own name. 
Pattin, in his drowse, answers as foolishly as one 
does in some parlor-game, when one is unexpect- 
edly hit on the nose with a handkerchief or a pair 
of gloves : " Get up, rascal ! " 

With these forfeits I go down again. But I take 
the wrong staircase, and the door I open lets me 
into the park. It is empty, luminous; guarded by 
poor yellowing sentinels, blue-shadowed coppices, 
the reserve of autumn and of the night; great 
cedars crouched level with the sleeping lawns ; mid- 
night brightness and silence heaped up against 
this barrage, whose wall separates them from the 
forces of war. 

Once in a while an armed soldier strays in, as I 
did, and is startled into silence; says a word to 
me of the solitude and goes up again. For we 
have to go up again and pass out into the noisy 
courtyard from this subterranean domain. 

The colonel is on the steps, hesitating as he 

does every morning between his two fine horses; 

he decides, by the aid of a lantern, on the first one 
.... I3I .... 



The Grand Tour 

on whose head its shaft falls. At the cross-roads 
the regiment is already defiling. The corporals 
call the roll as they march, and redistribute the 
names that, like the rest of our equipment, had 
been removed for the night. There are some that 
come to our ears which one would like to keep for 
one's self: for the rest of the campaign, war- 
names — Bellenave, Trinquelard; for later on, 
peace-names — Jean Fraxene, Saint-Prix. 

It is dark. The will of the generals is not yet 
as powerful as the laws of gravitation, and it is 
in the low places that we find the artillery, on the 
heights the hussars. We go fast, because they 
give way before us without a word, and get their 
horses into line. In the rear, too, we feel for the 
first time a spirit of kindness and good-will. 
When we pass the convoy the drivers of the sup- 
ply wagons give us their bread, and the despatch- 
riders, whose game yesterday was to jostle and 
dismay us, go by without a word, rubbing an 
affectionate hand over each of us in turn, as a 
child caresses the bars of a gate; the farther back 
they come from, the more devoted we divine 
them to be — Paris, away behind us, must just 
now be the very center of military good-will. 
Motor-cyclists bring the mail, for the postmen of 
.... 1^2 ••■• 



First Dead 

our army have willed not to sleep, and to dis- 
tribute before the morning. Lorand actually gets 
a letter mailed the evening before, which, with 
the connivance of some postmaster, has covered 
the road from Neuilly-sur-Seine to Dammartin 
at top speed. He reads it to us, for it is the only 
war letter that on its arrival has brought news, 
instead of stale reminiscences: yesterday the can- 
non were heard at Neuilly; yesterday at five in 
the afternoon Lorand's girl cousins came to 
spend the night, for they are taking the train at 
four in the morning. Now at last we feel our souls 
keeping time with the souls of civilians; we love 
them a little better for it, and especially adore 
the poor cousins who at this very moment are 
dressing in haste, brushing their beautiful teeth 
by candlelight, and pressing down their valises 
with their two petticoated knees. 

Dammartin is packed with troops. From all 
the doors, feet first, overflow sleeping soldiers. 
Not a light, not a dispute; to the animals only do 
the men talk — to the horses they saddle, to the 
dogs they startle; among themselves they are 
without speech. A little house is burning without 
the zouaves' apparently noticing the flames, and 

our reservists themselves, who are all firemen or 
.... I33 .... 



The Grand Tour 

fire sergeants in their towns, look on and feel the 
instinct of rescue dead within them. Poor fire, 
which ends, however, by lighting the dawn. 

The dark edges of the road choose for the day, 
according to their humor, one of the two uniforms 
which the highway commission permits, and be- 
come young elms or acacias. Here is the sunrise. 
We suddenly shiver, come naked out of the night. 
After five hours of marching, morning finds us as 
strong and hearty as one is at noon, but dawn 
with its faint, thin air gives us no sustenance. 
Our brigade is again isolated; the Moroccans on 
our left, and the English on our right have van- 
ished, and their two encircling groups are as re- 
mote and abstract an assistance to us as England 
and Morocco themselves. I am beside Dollero, 
who is dreaming of peace, who declares it is 
stupid to complicate one's life, and is going to 
marry his petite amie as soon as he gets back. 
How many petites amies we in France promised 
ourselves to marry toward the 6th of September! 
But, if he dies, I must have something to remem- 
ber him by, and it shall not be his Louis XVI 
sconce, which has no mate, but his Boilly drawing, 
the inquisitive young girl of whom the critics say 
that Boilly was never more studied by a model. 
.... 134 .... 



First Dead 

Lucky sergeant, whose friends, on the morning 
of a battle, feel that they owe him the portrait of 
a little girl! 

* 
* * 

After Dollero, my two other neighbors, Dri- 
geard and Dremois. It is a comfort to have three 
comrades whose initial is the same, as if it were 
an entire page torn out of the soldiers' dictionary. 
Drigeard hands me the report, which the colonel 
sends the sergeant-majors. When we halt, it is 
I who dictate it, with an order of the day that 
must be summarized — for there are two min- 
utes left — in telegraphic style: "At hour when 
begins battle on which depends fate France, fit- 
ting remember ages past, look back. Unities will 
let selves be killed, rather than yield ground." 
We are not especially moved, being accustomed 
to pick up, as by wireless, the most diverse orders. 
All the same, there was fighting here yesterday. 
Behind the bushes, forgotten knapsacks; on a 
battle-meadow, green as can be, some dead horses 
around the carcass of a bull — a Spanish army 
would shudder. We also see all the ranks of the 
regiment in front of us turning toward a lonely 

elm that stands beside the road, and the news 
.... i 35 .... 



The Grand Tour 

travels down the line that the Prussians came as 
far as that. Why only so far? Why did n't they 
wish to know the southern side of the elm, with 
its golden bark clear of lichen, where a notch had 
just been cut with an axe above the highest flood- 
mark? We look back to see the tree again, and 
know what the Uhlan viewed of France before he 
turned his rein: a chateau hidden by ash-trees, a 
town set in poplars — nothing fortunately, thanks 
to the trees, that has taken his stare unveiled. 
Here is a second elm, a larger one, which those 
who did not understand the first are studying 
curiously. All the torn papers that are blowing 
about, all the letters we pick up after this are 
covered with German script, for the Germans 
have gathered in all the French papers. Here is 
the last house where they halted. The peasant is 
at the door, and explains to us that he had them 
just a quarter of an hour. The invasion lasted 
long enough for him to light the fire, and go down 
to the cellar; when he came up again, they were 
running away. The two great emotions in the 
lives of the inhabitants of the captured towns of 
Lille, Laon, and Vouziers come to him almost 
simultaneously. He is the lucky man who mar- 
ried in the evening the woman he met in the 
.... J36 •••• 



First Dead 

morning; the man whose money brings in the 
interest of a lifetime on the day of investment. 
An egoist for whom the war has ended; having no 
more need of the army, he refuses us his potatoes 
and his eggs. 

* * 

Now the sky is blue and we are hot. The sun 
has made a point of drying the dew that has 
fallen on the soldiers first of all. Friendly groups 
begin to form again, and the battalion thins out 
in the spots where affection and good- will do not 
flourish. A water service has been established, 
and with our hands full of a golden powder — for 
cocoa has been distributed — we wait, helpless, 
for the men to come back. For forty-five years 
the Germans have only waited for this unguarded 
minute. 

Three shells — so unexpected that nobody 

dreams of being afraid of them. The first falls 

thunderously in the very middle of the road and 

rips the regiment into double columns of two, 

each one of which buries itself in its own ditch; 

the second, less noisy, breaks into fiery balls; the 

last diffuses an intolerable smell of powder. All 

three different and pretentious in their effects, as 
.... I37 .... 



The Grand Tour 

if we were going to devote a special remark in our 
journals to each German shell. Here are three 
more — and you feel the sort of fear you have 
when you go shooting and the partridges flutter 
into your face instead of flying away. As I turn I 
see the clear-cut outlines of two thousand heads 
beaten down — all but one, which looks at me 
from afar, so that I may never forget, even for a 
second, what a man's face is: it is a mask with 
two eyes and their human look, two lips, one ear. 
Three more shells: the face has come closer; it 
has a beard, the forehead is low and mean. With 
each volley it changes thus, and wanders, fine or 
base, over these thousands of decapitated bodies. 
All the officers have dismounted, since they 
have at last got to the long-expected war; and 
Michal, radiant, for it is he who has led us there, 
rejoins his telegraph operators once for all. We 
laugh and tell stories. Those who only asked not 
to be killed by the first shell pretend to be en- 
tirely at ease. The most timid imagine their heads 
in their hands, stick them on again with the cap on 
top, and give a kick at our dogs, which are run- 
ning bewildered in the middle of the empty road, 
wondering, as each shock comes, what monstrous 
tin can they are being chased by. In our ditches 
.... 138 .... 



First Dead 

we sit down and make ourselves comfortable; 
those who were eating a hard-boiled egg finish it 
up, and we can lick the palms of our hands all the 
morning, too, because of the cocoa. It is for one 
moment trench warfare — two verdant trenches 
perpendicular to the enemy; a naive war, where 
one does n't yet find any of those people who are 
annoyed by shells that don't. explode; or any of 
the fussers who prefer percussion shells; or any of 
the- people whose neighbors are always killed; an 
endurable war, for suddenly it is all over. The 
most valiant or the most rheumatic of us get up 
first, shake ourselves, and we are soon all stand- 
ing about talking — encumbered, for the mo- 
ment, by our arms, as if we no longer needed 
them; or as we shall be, dear comrade, the day 
of our return. 

* 
* * 

We do not agree with those who declare they 
see nothing at the war. We see everything. From 
the hilltop where we await orders we see a large 
oval country, and the battle for Paris takes place 
in an empty field, which has this form and shape. 
As far as the eye can reach, the rolling surface of a 
land already despoiled of its wheat, strewn with 
.... 139 .... 



The Grand Tour 

sheaves, each one of which seems even now to 
be marking the place of a wounded man; we are 
as glad to see them as cautious sailors would be 
to see spars and buoys distributed before a sea- 
battle. On our left a platoon of dragoons on pa- 
trol, rilling completely the space that separates 
the army from the Channel, a platoon which we 
alternately take — we confess to an equal con- 
cern in either case — for Uhlans and for our gen- 
eral staff. On the right some regiments, still 
badly deployed, stiff and formal as if they had on 
Sunday uniforms; their principal anxiety seems 
to be to prevent a loose horse from going over to 
the enemy. The roads, suddenly too echoing and 
too fragile, are deserted. We cross them at a run, 
on the tips of our toes. Great white clouds hang 
low on the horizon, and the battlefield seems 
wadded. 

Seven o'clock. From each company men are 
now beginning to scatter, lavishing cheering 
words and good-byes as they go. We had not yet 
been obliged, in our regiment, to distinguish be- 
tween those who do and those who do not go into 
battle. The postal sergeant goes off. Bardan goes 
off. The little wood at our backs, a fantastic sort 

of sieve, allows the thin secretaries and their fat 
.... J4Q .... 



First Dead 

sergeant to slip through. We are a little annoyed 
with them for concealing from us for five weeks 
that they would desert us at the first shell. For 
each man who goes off, the chances of death, by 
the mere law of averages, close in nearer about the 
rest of us, and our mission as fighters reveals itself 
for the same reason. Here we are, alone. At the 
entrance to the arena, warriors that we are, we 
are for one moment as sharply conscious of our 
profession as the gladiators used to be; we are 
conscious of being clumsy or supple, courageous 
or full of fear. Lazy, all of us already, like boxers, 
or runners, or any sort of professional athletes, 
for that matter; used up as soon as our energy is 
not needed, drawing no force from the earth save 
when we lie down on it. It is a surprise, too, to 
find here those whom we were of course taking to 
Germany, but not to fight; little Dollero, pale, 
absent, carrying his gun clumsily and suddenly 
losing his form — there are three or four who 
seem, as he does, to be dressed in old clothes and 
armed with guns that are too long, and bayonets 
that are too short; whereas the comrades that 
surround them suddenly appear dressed and 
armed to their own measure. We are all serious, 
for what had no reason or consequence yesterday 
.... 141 .... 



The Grand Tour 

is to-day a question of death; the foremost of the 
squad think they will be the first to get the bul- 
lets, while the soldiers in the middle feel con- 
strained to make war between barriers of living 
soldiers — an inconvenient war. Each man ma- 
neuvers his poor separate unity with the ready- 
made formulas of great generals in his head — 
by protecting his left, by taking his range in 
advance; one's body is as unmanageable as an 
army. The most friendly sections keep their dis- 
tances rigorously. Only Jeudit, the liaison soldier, 
continues to rattle on, delighted with three letters 
that he has received this morning, and repeating 
that there is no invention like the post. Nobody 
has the heart to take up the defense of the print- 
ing press, or steam, or Sapolio, against him. Sev- 
eral sergeant-majors shout to him to fall into line. 

"I follow the colonel," he replies. 

He is the most modest attachment of the 
colonel, the part that copies orders on two white 
pages joined with a pin. If he is caught, swallow- 
ing them will have its dangers. He is the part 
that tells the colonel the time — not always with- 
out making him lose patience, for Jeudit's watch 
is in his cartridge-belt, and it costs him a cartridge 
at the least to hunt up the exact minute. His is 
.... J42 •••• 



First Dead 

the best place; instinctively we get near the man 
of the company who is supposed to be lucky, who 
looks it, who is not near-sighted, or too fat, and 
has — as much as any man one knows only by 
sight can have it — an air of immortality. Una- 
ware that the immortal member of the regiment 
is Verdier — the only one, after three years of 
war, who has not been either wounded or inva- 
lided — we for one more day confuse the regi- 
ment's fate with the colonel's fate. Everybody 
gets near him as soon as he can, as if he were a 
shelter, and often during the day an unknown 
soldier joins our group, silent, ready to oblige; 
it is a soldier who, for a moment only, does not 
care to die. 

But here comes a cyclist from the brigade, 
bringing some thin sheets of paper that blow 
away; we run after him, and the general staff of 
the regiment follows its orders for a minute as 
the great poets do their thoughts — by climbing 
over hedges, shaking branches, and running into 
captains. We are to leave Major Gerard's three 
companies with the artillery, and advance with 
the five others through Saint-Pathus to a height. 
Further orders will meet us up there; all day 

Sunday, indeed, they will come to us at each 
.... I43 .... 



The Grand Tour 

culminating point, the more to resemble inspira- 
tion. Dry orders that now refuse all play or rela- 
tion with the names on the map, and no longer 
recommend us, as they did during the marches 
or exercises, to pass by the " Y" of Vincy, or find 
quarters between the two halves of a hyphenated 
name — Croix-Blanche, Grand-Puis; and besides 
we have reached a rectangle on the map where the 
names have been borne to the right by the same 
blast of wind, and leave a great empty space. 
We see it, after climbing the hill — it is the same 
yellow rolling field, crossed in the opposite direc- 
tion by roads which have preserved the plan of 
some battle of the Empire; we avoid them with 
care, so as to stay in our own war. 

In Saint-Pathus remains one solitary inhabi- 
tant, the mayor, who shows us the way to La 
Therouanne, explaining how illogical the limits of 
his town are: there, twenty yards from the church, 
it is Oissery, and the shadow of the church-tower 
dwells in the rival town — it is less serious than 
if it were the shadow of the town-hall. At Oissery 
an old man, who wants us to tell him the weight 
of a German bullet, and the way the German can- 
nons work; if he is a spy, he is a French spy. We 
go slowly, shells exploding at long intervals; the 
.... 144 .... 



First Dead 

battle, as sometimes happens in the "movies," 
stays a full hour at slow speed. Sometimes it takes 
on its true speed again, sometimes it exceeds it, 
at Bregi, for instance, where we strike a camp of 
enemy hussars, whom we vainly try to pursue. 
They were engaged in distributing their mail, and 
the letters of the German colonel are brought to 
our colonel. We pick up a hundred saddles: the 
thought that a whole Prussian squadron is this 
moment getting black and blue is not disagreeable 
to us. 

The shells are now bursting just over us, every 
ten seconds, very high up, scarcely dangerous at 
all, and a burning soot falls on our shoulders as 
soon as we get up to advance. We are chimney- 
sweeps cleaning a sparkling heaven. The differ- 
ent sections make their rushes as usual; some- 
times they pass us, sometimes we pass them. As 
the whistle blows, we see all their bodies rise al- 
most horizontal, pulled up by their pale faces, and 
fall, twenty yards farther on, when their heads be- 
come too heavy again.. They pass with a martial 
sound, but once they lie flat before us we can see 
nothing of them, on top of their packs, but a 
coffee-mill, or a lantern, or a saucepan — what- 
ever they carry in the way of peaceful and do- 
.... 145 .... 



The Grand Tour 

mestic objects. From time to time a smell of 
peppermint; one recognizes in the same way those 
who have broken their alcohol bottles during a 
charge. From time to time we see friends; here 
is Sartaut, here is Jalicot, and here — as if they 
were advancing in rhymes — are Lorand and 
Parent. Sometimes a straggler who has lost his 
bayonet, his wallet too, whom the colonel en- 
courages: — 

"What's your name?" 

"Malassis." 

" Come now, advance. Who is your sergeant?" 

"My sergeant is Goupil, my lieutenant is 
Bertet." 

When their names are asked, they all give ex- 
traordinary names that they have dug out of the 
Middle Ages. Only above the rank of lieutenant 
is one sure of getting a somewhat modern name. 
Here come the bullets. We heard one of them in 
Alsace, so they surprise us less. We deploy, and 
the men tumble after each other toward the scat- 
tered sheaves — they almost always run toward 
the same one, as if from far away it alone looked 
safe; then disperse regretfully toward the neigh- 
boring ones. No wounded as yet. Sometimes it 

seems to us as if a certain man had fallen down 
.... J46 .... 



First Dead 

very hard, or as if another groaned; we await with 
anguish the signal for departure, but, as the 
whistle blows, the suspicious bodies rise up like 
the rest. Nothing is more encouraging than a res- 
urrection. The colonel laughs. The men laugh. 
Sometimes, when a shell fails to explode, it seems 
possible that nobody at all will be killed. Some- 
times, by force of hope, we feel that the hour of 
the first man killed is deferred by this energy of 
ours. Then suddenly we notice a little crowd col- 
lecting somewhere, and hope drops. 

I am the one whom the colonel sends toward 
this eddy every time; he pins his faith to my lucky 
ability to dissolve these enormous violet patches 
without losing him his first man, and till noon I 
succeed. It's only an enormous ant-hill. It's a 
dying horse. It is a corpse, the first the regiment 
sees, but it is one of the Gneisenau Hussars. It is 
another corpse, but — last and most selfish of my 
efforts — it is a dead man of the brigade, lying on 
top of a wounded one, on whom the shell has 
thrown him. Nobody dares separate them, as if 
to do so were a crime. One or two soldiers bare 
their heads. Others, after pitying the dead, com- 
fort the wounded man, — who acts as a me- 
dium to bring them back to life, — and ask him 
.... 147 .... 



The Grand Tour 

what the dead man's name is: he can't see it, he 
thinks it is poor old Blanchard. Has he got a 
beard? 

* 
* * 

It is now the turn of this regiment, and chance 
has only to choose between our two battalions. 

One last refuge. In the bottom of the valley, 
separating the field from the road, there is a ra- 
vine, flanked with trees whose tops scarcely show 
above the edge. The whole regiment plunges into 
this trench of young elm-trees. Order to halt. 
Comrades meet again laughing and breathless, 
and chatter so loud that the officers threaten, as 
they do at the maneuvers, to start again imme- 
diately. Long rest. Some wipe off their bayonets, 
and the liaison officers even sharpen their pencils. 
Cans of Spanish mackerel are doled out, and they 
pass around the sick-list on which the soldiers who 
have sore feet or toothache inscribe their names 
— jokingly, for this is only a claim-book against 
illnesses, and they are not to see the doctor. Little 
civilian maladies reappear for a moment, and take 
on important airs in this dead angle, safe from 
bullets. A corporal shows everybody a gash he 
has got in the wrist, and the colonel congratu- 
.... I4 8 .... 



First Dead 

lates him; if the regiment were fighting a duel 
this first blood drawn would leave nothing to do 
but go home again. Eyes are clearer, lips more 
finely moulded, words less coarse, for we all feel 
that we gain by presenting our souls and bodies to 
the shells with as little weight upon them as may 
be. Between eyebrows, lines are etched and min- 
gled like initials. Faces whose whole force one 
covets, if one looks straight at them; but they 
turn away from you. Men with round chins, 
with very level eyes — the badly wounded of to- 
night, who so far can only be comforted for the 
most trifling ills: a cold in the eye, a blistered foot. 
On the most absent lips — as we shall see it on 
the lips of so many of the dead — a cigarette 
burns down till it scorches. 

Two o'clock: order to start forward. We leave 
the ravine with sorrow, realizing obscurely what 
going out of one's trench will mean. All that the 
assaulting troops are to feel later, we feel; even a 
little more grievously, for in this first trench we 
had trees and shade, and on the edge of the ra- 
vine, instead of grass and soft earth, a stony road 
greets us so hardly! Above our mass, all our 
proper names, which have been suddenly roused, 
fly from one to the other. Then each name settles 
.... 149 .... 



The Grand Tour 

down, and we climb the slope. The white clouds 
have lifted; the horizon is clear for a battle with- 
out boundaries; and in the fields behind us no- 
body but the colonel's mares, which escape from 
their tether, but gallop off together so that the colo- 
nel may have but one anxiety for the two of them. 

We wait on the hill-top, for our artillery is not 
lengthening its aim. Just one last time I see my 
regiment, with all its peculiar characteristics: its 
Lieutenant Bertet, standing — his soldiers try 
in vain to make him lie down near them, but his 
thought is vertical to-day; its Captain Perret, al- 
ways arguing, obliging his men, under shell-fire, 
to learn the names of the villages in sight and to 
repeat, before the command to fire, "The village 
to the right is Puisieux, the village opposite is 
Vincy, the village in the distance is Douy-la- 
Ramee; leave out the Ramee, that's too compli- 
cated"; with its Lieutenant Viard, who, being 
unable to keep quiet, pretends not to recognize 
the trees, and questions his irritable second lieu- 
tenant from the colonies: — 

"Those are elms over there, or oaks?" 

"Palms, sir." 

"I mean those big trees behind those queer 
trees — poplars, I think? " 

.... 150 -.. 



First Dead 

"Machined trees." 

He is on the point of losing his temper, but sud- 
denly here are the 79's and the 131's — so declares 
Artaud, who has never been able to keep the true 
figures of the calibers in his head; and here — 
emotion makes him find the right number this 
time — are the 305's. 

* 
* * 

It is Dollero who receives me in the ravine; a 
poor little poet in pain, quite empty of images and 
metaphors; it emaciates him. A horse is nibbling 
the acacias. Officers are reading their last letters, 
and hold them in their hands, like parts in a play. 
Sad stage-wings of war. Soldiers are looking at 
themselves in little mirrors — this time it's to 
find blood-spots on their faces; sometimes a man 
leaps in from outside, and sits down, his employ- 
ment on the stage over. All this in the midst of 
a sweet, sickish perfume, for some fool is burning 
joss-sticks. 

It has happened. Here is the first one. Two 

soldiers prop him up against the bank, and next 

him the second one, quite tiny. They change 

him about, shake him, collect in him for the last 

time whatever is human. They search his face for 
.... I5I .... 



The Grand Tour 

a resemblance that is already beginning to escape 
them; and at the moment when they most catch 
it, bare their heads. For the smaller one, leaning 
over a little farther, and growing a little more 
moved, they repeat all that they do for the bigger; 
little by little they abbreviate their gestures as if 
their final aim were to bury still a third dead, a 
child. The whistle shrills, and when they break 
up the stack of arms they find themselves with 
two extra weapons, for they had made it with the 
two guns of the dead. Stealthily they put them 
down on a neighboring stack. Then they go off, 
and nobody is left with Dollero but the stray 
horse, which comes near, snuffs, goes off again, 
hopeless of understanding the death of an in- 
fantryman. . . . 
A man killed. . . . My war is over. 



The Dardanelles 



THE DARDANELLES 

To our right Marmora fell away; to our left the 
Gulf of Saros seemed to climb. On this peninsula, 
which thrusts itself like the bow of a boat between 
the rising and the falling sea, we lay, one close 
against the other, asleep. My neighbors were the 
twin brothers; if I woke I could comfort myself 
with the thought that all Frenchmen are alike. 
War then appeared an anodyne; it was enough 
that one of us should be saved, just one; and when 
I shut my eyes again there also came to me, came 
and calmed me, the thought of an only child, of 
one wife. France in her remoteness made herself 
simple, to give one for a moment the sleep of 
primitive man. Then suddenly the same guilty 
hand lighted all at the same time, each on its own 
continent, sunrise, daybreak, — and toward Ar- 
menia, the cold dawn. The stars dwindled. Two 
silver olive-trees — as we often see them on the 
"movie" screen — were stirring and shivering 
between the lines — the tatters of an immortal 
foliage. Then the sun rose. 

It rose just below us, under our caps, under our 
.... 155 .... 



The Dardanelles 

knapsacks, and I thought what each one of my men 
would have done had he received the sun itself as 
a gift. Baltesse would have kneaded it, rolled it 
in his hands; Riotard would have balanced it on 
his head, catching it when it bounced off. It was 
a carmine sun, which set everything on fire, and 
pricked our staring eyes till they suddenly seemed 
projections of its rays. A lark, attracted by the 
glitter of our arms and our kits, came soaring over 
the trench, following every traverse, every salient. 
Over in the Turkish lines they would only have 
had to draw its flight to know our shelter, and 
especially to mark those Frenchmen — the worst 
enemies of the Prophet — who use a mirror. On 
the coast of Asia one color was laid on after an- 
other, and my corporal from the Beaux-Arts 
shouted and protested when the same one re- 
appeared. Every black rock, every gold-bordered 
cypress, was no more than a thick, blurred mass, 
choking up one of the springs of day. Little by 
little a light that was heavier than water fell into 
the depths of the Strait; you could see mosques 
balanced on their minarets, plane-trees turned 
upside down, hour-glasses to measure times and 
seasons: you understood the Orient. . , . But by 
this time the people who rise early had begun to 

.... i 5 6 .... 



The Dardanelles 

attack on the left, and some Sydney regiments, 
surprising the Kurds, were exterminating them 
without quarter, because the Turk is the national 
enemy of the Australian. 
* 
* * 

Relief. At the junction of the Anglo-French 
line the liaison officers had stopped exchanging 
postage-stamps, and without this gummed paper 
there was danger of their losing contact again. 
We went down over the hills, jostling Bambaras 
and Peuls in the corridors; creatures with inglori- 
ous eyes, poor blurred and dulled images of our- 
selves — for our major-general, a clever strate- 
gist, kept his white soldiers on duty at night, his 
negroes by day. All the brilliance, all the empti- 
ness, which the greatest poets in our country 
only suspect when they lie on their backs in the 
middle of a rolling field — these were ours here 
in our boyau. Miserable soldiers that we were, 
three months ago in France, to be ordered off on 
patrol duty and then to risk death just to see the 
tip of a church-tower between two clods of earth! 
Along the flanks of the peninsula below us the 
sea etched those parallel lines that we see only 

in good maps. We went on again, raising the sun 
.... l57 .... 



The Dardanelles 

to the level of our arms by a single downward 
stride. For those who do not care to see a whole 
continent the first thing in the morning, there 
were islands. In the purple gulf, English ships; 
in the Straits, French ones, which prefer golden 
waters. We recognized the Henri IV, with its 
back-slanting plank; the Ch&teaurenaud, riding 
at anchor, but flecked with imitation foam at the 
bow to make the Turkish artillery think she was 
speeding at thirty knots. The torpedo destroyers, 
which had come in as far as Yenikeui, were 
slowly drifting out again, stern foremost, instead 
of turning. Far on the horizon Tenedos kept 
changing its place as we walked, attaching itself 
now to one island, now to another, then floating 
clear again to follow Imbros or Samothrace. Be- 
tween its olive hill and its cypress hill the camp 
was astir, and every bird, too, showed a dark 
wing and a light. From four solitary columns 
rose ring-doves, flying by threes, and jays, which 
flew in couples; as if Love, half awake at this 
early hour, were still confusing his symbols. 
Some cicadas, those born that very morning on 
the plain, where the olive-trees had all been cut, 
lifted themselves ambitiously to the height of the 
pines, found nothing, dropped then to the level 

.... i 5 8 .... 



The Dardanelles 

of the olives, where they fell and died. We had 
now got within earshot of the African Chasseurs, 
who had been anchored in the roads for a fort- 
night, and were blowing their trumpets steadily 
to quiet the restless horses on the deck. 

The whole army was there, between slopes 
which were now bare of their young rye, and 
their barley, younger still; contained on a mere 
ten acres which Englishmen, on their way to 
bathe, crossed all day long with their towels, just 
as they used to step across France to Nice. The 
gold-brown mass in the distance was the too-white 
horses of the spahis, enameled, by order, with 
permanganate; encamped at the mouth of the 
brook it was their right, as privileged beings, to 
drink all the water that came down to them. 
The zouave, with boxes on his head, was Colonel 
Nieger's orderly, bound for the chateau with 
Tanagra figurines that the sappers had dug up; 
whenever a shell came near him he stood per- 
fectly still like a Spanish toreador who freezes 
into a statue when snuffed at by a bull. A New 
Zealander was painting his cannon in tiger-stripes 
to give it a more natural air. Some splendid 
aeroplanes were bringing the general staff chick- 
ens from Tenedos. 

.... I59 .... 



The Dardanelles 

All that the European war had rejected was 
here; all the people whom the engineers of the 
next century will exile and imprison on an island: 
scholars, madmen, sportsmen. There was the 
most famous of Irish entomologists, whom the 
Indians — brothers of the ant — arrested from 
time to time as a spy; war in the English sector 
was hard upon insects, too. There were Creoles 
from the island of Reunion, whose poor circular 
gaze their sergeant sought in vain to lengthen 
on this long-drawn peninsula by always making 
them aim at Achi-Baba. There was the million- 
aire who had come with his nine hunters of Span- 
ish wild goats. They were armed with giant 
spy-glasses, and used them lying flat on their 
backs, as Moroccans use their guns — one of 
them always declared he could see snow. Nothing 
but volunteers, these men of Auvergne and Bur- 
gundy, who had always wanted to see Byzan- 
tium; simple souls whom one recognized at a 
glance to have been born before the age of lies. 
The taller were more romantic, the smaller more 
practical, the darker more passionate. There 
were Duparc and Garrigue, — one square-built, 
with eyes that did not match, the other a giant 
with braided hair, — archaic warriors, who in 
.-.. 160 •••• 



The Dardanelles 

the siege operations of an earlier age would have 
offered themselves to handle the ram. There were 
the two policemen from Beziers, who all day long 
prevented us from cutting wood or bird's-nesting, 
under penalty of the law, and who, after dark, — 
always in the interest of the general staff, — pur- 
sued the forbidden sport of fishing with hand- 
grenades. There was Moreas, Toulouse Lautrec, 
Albala, who had never before been seen outside 
his Paris cafe. The Turks and the Greeks of the 
brigade, consulting together in a circular trench, 
were busy compiling the little dictionary that 
was to be so useful when we entered Constanti- 
nople, and could not agree either about the word 
"fox" or the word "immortal." . . . They some- 
times got up all together and demanded the 
Croix de Guerre. 

We were having lunch. We had half a quart 
of wine, a leg of cold-storage mutton, a sweet 
biscuit. Drunk and replete, we did not mind 
lending our fountain-pens to the comrades who 
were to attack to-morrow, and who were recopy- 
ing — from inability to love better ■*— the letters 
written before the last attack. Hoffman was 
playing his pocket-bugle in tears — he always 
wept as he played, otherwise it would have been 
.... 161 •••» 



The Dardanelles 

the flute, which his lachrymose habit had obliged 
him to give up in his school days. Juery was 
writing poetry, his head at the bottom of the 
trench, his feet against the parapet, so that quan- 
tities of the same letters rolled about inside him, 
and at the Dardanelles nothing came to him but 
alliterations. For our water spaniel, Garrigue 
collected tortoises, orange adders, scorpions; but 
presented the monsters one at a time, lest he 
should come to believe in a single too-powerful 
beast. The sacristan of the Church of Sainte- 
Eugenie at Biarritz, who was to be the first to 
die, had already given himself a scratch with his 
gun, and for his sake they broke my first tube of 
iodine. I took advantage of it to hand out my 
laudanum. From that time on, all my good-bye 
presents were to be of service: there was nothing 
that could not answer some purpose; the little 
pharmacopeia, the English flask, the purple-and- 
red blanket ... all my friends had been useful 
to me. ... I was cheating nobody's kindness . . . 
I could die. 



Midday. In each wave, the sun and a whole 
jelly-fish. In each clod of earth, a centipede clasp- 
.... 162 •••• 



The Dardanelles 

ing the day's hot center in its rigidly curved feet. 
The wind was blowing from Russia and covered 
us with sand, all but our arms and legs, which 
we could shake. The Senegalese, taking their 
siesta in their hole edged with mosaics of pebbles, 
were doing what we do at midnight; turning, and 
groaning, and calling on their wise men. War was 
half asleep, and to spare her fist, was striking 
only things with a give to them: the sea, the 
ships — she was attacking the bobbing cistern 
boat with fury. The Annam, the mail boat, was 
burning in the roadstead, and blackened papers 
floated all the way up to us. The Triumph had 
been torpedoed, and was sinking; we could hear 
the crew, drawn up at attention on the deck, 
chanting her name. The Strait swelled between 
its two banks as if an enormous submarine were 
stealing down its center. All the boats were 
whistling the alarm; all the sirens were screech- 
ing, and the ships, suddenly gone blind, maneu- 
vered in the whirlwinds of light with more noise 
and cautiousness than in the thickest fog. Le- 
gionaries were firing volleys at the floating mines. 
Scarcely visible at the far end of the Gulf, the 
largest armored cruiser in the world was having 
an attack of nerves, and shrouded herself at inter- 

.... 163 •••• 



The Dardanelles 

vals with a golden powder, as flowers throw out 
pollen at the approach of a noxious insect. Like 
children who have taken refuge in an organ loft, 
our men slept on. 

But now Afire, the judge, came back from the 
Cape, dripping with perspiration, and loaded 
with sweet lemons. He offered them to us with 
misplaced allusions — for even when he has the 
Dardanelles under his eyes he always confuses 
them with the Hesperides — and took us off to 
bathe. Picking our way over colonials, over le- 
gionaries, stretched out side by side — unable 
till we reached the shore to take a single step 
shorter or broader than a sleeping man — we 
came at last to Myrto. Then we went swimming, 
bumping negroes, who sank at our touch like 
good hippopotami. As our eyes were on the level 
of the water, all the shadow we had left took ref- 
uge on our heads, and we had only to dive to get 
rid of it forever. 



Thus we lived, without living too much, 
through flat and dazzling days; we felt ourselves 
minute points above the world's joy, and its sor- 
row; we did not dig our shelters either, because 
.... 264 .... 



The Dardanelles 

the water kept coming in. The little hump made 
by our writing-case under our cloak, which varies 
in the European soldier as the heart varies among 
civilians, was always the same size with us, 
who had no interest in letters — scarcely visible at 
all. No vile or futile act could be even imagined; 
one was in plain sight from every side, and not 
a movement was permitted unless it was accep- 
table to ten different peoples. An inoffensive, 
careless world, like worlds of a single sex: with- 
out falsifying their story, historians may recount 
our exploits in the feminine gender, and let it be 
thought that the armies of the Dardanelles were 
armies of women. Fabulous evenings. The col- 
onels, made languid by the burning heat, came 
to cool their hands in the current of the Strait, as 
in Brittany one goes to warm them in the Gulf 
Stream. A child of Miramas, the only offshoot 
of these hundred thousand warriors, went from 
company to company — a make-believe child — 
to be admired. The African soldiers were already 
slipping out of their holes toward the cemetery, to 
steal the pebbles from the tombs and finish their 
mosaic design. The French, suddenly realizing 
how impossible it was that they should n't see 
the station of the P-L-M again, that there should 
.... i6 S .- 



The Dardanelles 

not be any more jugged hare or Vouvray for them 
in this world, were reassured as to their fate and 
sang in chorus. Every one of their cheeses, too, — 
Brie, Levroux, Cantal, — was a promise of life; 
logically, if they reasoned it out, a promise of 
eternity. The Australians were smoking, with 
their shirt-sleeves rolled up, not thinking of the 
future, mortal beings. 

War! I hate him who loves you, and I hate 
him who detests you. The smoke of the kitchens 
came to us, but crouched in our burrow-like re- 
treat in the depths of the golden sea we resisted 
their odor. War, why are you not a mere idea in 
our minds, or why are you not at most limited to 
a few isolated friends, to a few naked men, as you 
suddenly were this afternoon, when Jacques and 
I were coming out of our bath and all the shells 
fell only on him and me? We could not reach our 
clothes; we fell to earth like wrestlers who know 
their strength, Jacques parallel to the tomb of 
Patroclus, I parallel to Jacques; you obliged us to 
make all sorts of friendly geometrical figures to es- 
cape you. Then the irritated trajectories stupidly 
lengthened, and the shells left us to fall on the 
camp and wound Colomb, our lieutenant, and 

kill poor Coulomb, his orderly — for the simple 
.... !66 .... 



The Dardanelles 

folk who bear our names, or almost bear them, 
are killed in our stead. 
* 
* * 

Midnight. The frogs of the Turkish brook 
were replying to our frogs in their code language, 
and I only understood what had to do with the 
weather. ... An Asian cannon, one millimeter 
smaller than the French one, made a furious at- 
tack upon it, and after this dilation grew peace- 
ful again. Every man of us, sure of his death, 
got out his farewell letter and confided it to his 
right-hand neighbor, an immortal. 

A day smooth and glossy as wax. What relief 
can I give to you, what other lonely evening, the 
evening of a young woman in France, shall I 
stamp upon you, so that our double soul, our 
double language, may sometime be born again, 
and Paris, with its gliding taxis? 



Ill 

Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 



Five Nights, Five 
Dawns on the Marne 

i 

SUNDAY 

Sunday, September 6, igi4. 
We have been here since one o'clock, all five of us, 
in a beet-field strewn with sheaves of wheat — 
flotsam left high and dry by the wave of attack. 
We bind them firmly together, and stack them; 
the day of fighting ends with the gestures of the 
harvester. Some sort of instinct, I suppose, makes 
us carry the sheaves to the farmhouse on our 
right, where we stop to rest, the German machine 
gun in the tree overlooking our huge shadows, and 
peppering them when it gets a chance. Over yon- 
der some one is creeping along: a man of the tele- 
graph corps, followed by several comrades, twenty 
yards or so behind him. They have no water — 
only chartreuse. 

Now there are fifteen or twenty of us, for we 
.... l?I .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

have just come across some soldiers in the lee of 
a haystack. They had miscalculated their posi- 
tion; instead of lying face on to the machine gun, 
they had turned their backs to it. They move 
round to the other side of the stack, thanking us 
as they go; they are glad to be set right, though 
the view was better where they were. They had 
the sweep of a whole valley; they could watch all 
the fires. (So far as one can tell in the darkness, 
the village of Puisieux is burning; Saint-Pathus, 
too. I think of the poor mayor, left alone to fight 
the blaze. Seven houses aflame!) Have we any 
water? they ask. They have nothing but Liqueur 
Raspail. 

News travels quickly on the battlefield. From 
time to time a new soldier comes creeping up to 
us, holding his hand before his face, protecting 
himself against the machine gun as one shelters a 
lantern, and gives me a list of the men who have 
spent the night under his hay stack, and an ac- 
count of what he has seen on the way; a corpse, 
a German, two wounded men. From every man 
who comes up we demand water; he eagerly 
hands over his canteen, but — here is a miracle 
we are far from desiring — we invariably find 
some dregs of cognac, or creme-de-menthe, or 
.... ij 2 ■•■■ 



Sunday 

rum instead. Each newcomer's bayonet is still 
fixed: the last remnant of the charge. As he takes 
his place in the straw beside us, he removes it, 
with the innocent gesture of a woman taking off 
her rings at night, then flings himself down full 
length. 

It is cold, but what utter repose! The men are 
smoking, taking great care on account of the 
straw. A corporal (once a masseur at Vichy) is 
conscientiously kneading his comrades who have 
stiff backs. He is very popular: his services are 
preempted in advance, as he moves from sheaf to 
sheaf. He will not allow himself to be hurried, 
however. He amuses himself by telling each man 
the names of his various muscles; the corporal, it 
seems, is a mass of Latin muscles. A haystack is 
on fire over yonder. My neighbors, who are peas- 
ants, discuss its cost. I find out exactly what it is 
worth; also the value of a single sheaf of wheat — 
the one I am lying on, for instance. We chew a 
few grains of this wheat, and find it excellent. It 
would seem that we are in a rich countryside: 
splendid poplars, immense beets, abundant har- 
vests. This is no cheap battlefield. If one is a peas- 
ant, this fact lends gravity to the fighting — grav- 
ity and calm as well. I hear the masseur say that 
.... I73 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

he saw Michal's body; the bullet had taken him 
full in the heart. Why did it have to be the mas- 
seur, I wonder? Now there is no more hope. . . . 

Every now and then German voices float down 
the wind to us. A soldier comes in, standing erect; 
he makes the ceiling seem higher, and somehow it 
becomes easier for us to breathe. Another soldier 
recognizes me with a shout of joy: "Why, here's 
the sergeant interpreter!" — and questions me 
eagerly, as though he had been waiting for me to 
translate for him everything he had seen during 
the day. The conversationalists have already won 
an advantage over the inarticulate spirits which 
they will keep till their dying day. They talk 
slowly, recounting the afternoon's adventures as 
though they were sitting by the fire on a winter's 
evening. Dollero, resting against my shoulder, 
listens without moving a muscle to sentences that 
change the very substance of his heart. Bernard, 
his best friend, is dead; and his cousin, when the 
Germans advanced in the darkness, shouting that 
they were Englishmen, stood up to greet them, — 
then fell. 

The machine gun, better aimed now, breaks 
loose, the bullets grazing our caps. We stop talk- 
ing. We are feeling the effects of all the liqueurs 
.... 174 .... 



Sunday 

that have been passed around: Benedictine, 
kirsch, cognac. We put our lips to the canteen, 
then hand it to the next man. The alcohol presses 
all its hot kisses on us. The bullets whine. We 
think of the word with which we shall acclaim the 
first one that strikes us; it hangs on our lips, all 
ready for the impact, and behind it follows a 
whole procession of other words, waiting for the 
succeeding bullets. A hundred might strike me, 
and I should have greetings for each. Names of 
friends, names of cities, rise within me — Nimes, 
Fougeres; then come humble workaday words. 
Could we do less than pay this tribute to houses, 
to books, to fountain-pens? . . . Suddenly a 
riderless horse gallops by into the night, dodging 
blows aimed at him, and drawing a rain of death 
from the shadows as he passes. 

Now the wounded are calling to us from over 
beyond the poplars. The battlefield opens out. 
We form patrolling parties: later we shall try to 
get to some village. The bolder spirits put the 
timid ones to shame, so that it is these latter who 
lead the way. We hear them talking as they stop 
beside the wounded men: — 

"Don't make a noise. We're here. Do you see 

us?" 

.... I75 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

"Yes." 

"It's all right. You're not frightened any 
more? " 
"No." 

Away in the distance we hear the colonel him- 
self, answering in that cadenced tone which is the 
very voice of anguish: — 

"Do you feel badly, sir?" 

"Yes." 

"Are we hurting you, sir?" 

"No." 

And we carry away as many wounded as we 
can, as from a fire, to the rear of this crackling, 
smoking fringe of France. 

We are off. Every fifty yards we let the colonel 
rest a little, and change places. Jeudit, who had 
lain close by his chief's side since he was wounded, 
obliging him to feign death when the Germans 
passed, carries his cap and his sword. He takes 
entire charge of the poor pale head: now he sup- 
ports it with his hand, now he makes a pillow of 
a knapsack stuffed with straw; he wipes the 
colonel's brow when he is hot; he draws a hood 
over his head when he is cold. Each soldier, fol- 
lowing Jeudit's example, lavishes his solicitude on 

an arm, a hand, or a shoulder, none venturing, in 
.... I7 6 .... 



Sunday 

his boundless respect, even to think of his com- 
mander as a whole. The colonel, out of gratitude, 
divides himself between us. 

"Jeudit! My neck!" 

"Dollero! My arm!" 

A big countryman stammers out a few words 
which he has been getting ready ever since we left 
the haystack: — 

"Everything's going finely, sir; everything's 
going first rate!" 

The colonel smiles, and after this he is the one 
who takes charge of the colonel's heart; who says 
that we'll win through, that it is cold but such a 
glorious evening ! We take away the cloak of the 
man who has fewest straps to unfasten and spread 
it over our chief. He is wandering a bit now: — 

"Shut the windows!" 

"Yes, sir; we'll shut them," answer the men. 

as. 

He opens his eyes and sees the burning village. 
He murmurs, — speaking aloud to avoid think- 
ing, — 

"That fire hurts my eyes — it hurts my eyes." 

"We'll put it out, sir," answer the men. 

Pitiful cries come to us from out of the darkness 

on all sides: the city-dwellers calling us by our 

rank, the peasants beseeching us with dumb 
.... I77 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

plaints that differ according to the regiment to 
which they belong: "Hold, hold" call the men of 
the Loire country; those from the north, " Lo, lol " 
and the Bourbonnais, " Voild, wild! 11 I recognize 
my own men by these cries, which hold up to us, 
as it were, that which is hurting them, "Voild, 
my shoulder V 1 The colonel shudders to hear this 
moan from a man who is wounded in the same 
place as he himself. 

"Take me, too!" comes the voice. 

"We can't do it, old man!" 

"But you're taking somebody else!" 

"It's the colonel." 

That gives them a moment of resignation. 
Whenever we can we try to come to a halt close 
to a wounded man. He tells us all about his bad 
luck, his wound, and when we move on he keeps 
silent. Then, after we have gone a little way, we 
hear him calling in torment: — 

"Take me, too, colonel! Take me, too!" 

We shout that we are coming back. Some of 
them curse us. Others innocently believe what we 
say, and give us directions for rinding them again. 

"I'm just to the left of the big haystack, near 
the hedge. Do you see? I '11 light a match every 
now and then." 

.... i 7 8 .- 



Sunday 

" Bring that man along, too," says the colonel. 

"Very well, sir," answer the men. 

We leave him lying there, but the colonel thinks 
a second stretcher is following along behind, and 
in an effort to be as silent as his soldier, he bites his 
lips the better to repress his anguish. From time 
to time an alarm is given: a riderless horse gal- 
lops up to us, but we barely touch him before he 
is off toward the poplars, only to come thundering 
back from the German hands that reach out for 
him. Wounded men everywhere. We feel glad 
when some sullen fellow refuses to look at us, or 
to answer our questions; glad, too, if they do not 
call us by name, as one poor man has just done, 
for to-night our names seem more rawly sensitive 
than our hearts. Occasionally we make a detour 
which the colonel cannot understand; it is to 
avoid a corpse, and the big peasant taken, in his 
emotion, by another spasm of optimism, stam- 
mers out: — 

"Everything's going finely, sir. It couldn't 
be better." % 

The fires die down, then flare up as if fresh fuel 

had been brought them. The four of us who are 

not carrying the colonel take the eight packs, 

the eight guns, the eight cartridge-belts, stooping 

.... 179 -. 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

as we go to pick up a sword, or another pack, 

thus making a heavier burden still for those who 

are to relieve us. From time to time the colonel 

bids farewell to some wounded man, and tells 

me to remember his name. They should have 

had short, simple names, however, — names 

of week-days, like Jeudit. I have forgotten 

them all. 

* 

"Get up, my boy!" 

A hand awakens me gently. It is a chaplain 
who has discovered me in the depths of a broken- 
seated chair. He extracts me with difficulty, 
pulling aside the shattered splints, and helps 
me escape from the wreckage of yesterday's 
Sabbath. 

"So the little Boches dropped you there, did 
they?" 

The word "little" is the only antidote that 
chaplains have been able to discover against the 
war. They say "the little shell," "the little 
Crown Prince." 

"Come along with me. There's a little sofa in 
your colonel's room." 

At six o'clock I wake up again. Through a hole 
.... !8o •••• 



Sunday 

in the curtains I get a sample of daylight; it is 
bright and clear. The cannon are thundering. 
Never has a traveler, arriving like us at a strange 
inn at midnight, felt greater curiosity and dis- 
quiet. Am I in a city? In a forest? Are we re- 
treating? Have we been victorious? I can get 
answers to all these questions merely by opening 
that door, yet I do not hurry. I dress in the dark- 
ness, and with the clinking of my accouterments 
things begin to come back to me. Over there, on 
the table, lie the objects Jeudit gave me in ex- 
change for his pack: a cap with five stripes, 
a gold watch, a wallet. Never was a soldier's 
pack ransomed so dearly. The colonel is asleep 
in a white bedstead. His Croix d'Honneur is 
pinned to the curtain. I open the door softly and 
leave the room, abashed, feeling out of place in 
so august a picture. 

Outside, a long corridor, like that of a provin- 
cial hotel, with yellow doors opening off it. By 
the doors lie boots, swords — the belongings of 
wounded officers. On a high shelf are piled rubber 
boots and bowler hats — the leavings of the farm- 
hands who used to live here. 

"What place is this?" 

It is the sort of question one asks when 
... 181 — 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

one's train makes a stop. The orderly does n't 
know. 

"Is it much of a town?" 

The orderly says that he arrived here only last 
night, and has no idea. He thinks, though, that it 
is very small. 

He takes me down a wooden staircase. As I 
descend the winding steps I begin to see, in a 
great room, pale heads, sallow heads, bloody 
heads; the orderly pushes me before him, and be- 
fore I know what has happened I have wound my 
way into the very heart of human anguish. The 
stretchers are fairly overflowing: they lie close- 
packed, and, in order to reach the door, I must 
walk all the way round certain wounded men who 
stare at me, longing to recognize at least one side 
of me. I lose my way 1 in a labyrinth which brings 
me up short before the impassable stretcher of a 
soldier who has fainted dead away. There is no 
going on; I have to return. The sergeants of the 
Medical Corps, seeing a fully armed sergeant from 
upstairs, gruffly ask me my business — for even 
officers are forbidden to enter here. They move 
about, these fellows, silencing any man who tries 
to talk, so that one hears nothing but the groans. 
The wounded soldiers, uneasy as to the meaning 
.... 182 .... 



Smtday 

of the pink or green labels they wear, watch for 
the label of each corpse as it is carried out, and 
turn pale or sigh contentedly according as its color 
does or does not match their own. The overworked 
doctors, the heavy-eyed quartermasters, I recog- 
nize them all; it was I who awoke them yesterday 
morning. At the end of the room there is a glass 
door through which one sees into a kitchen where 
a strapping young woman is walking calmly to 
and fro. Every now and then she puts her face 
up against the glass, and all the wounded men 
with pink labels — the light cases — try to sit 
up and look at her. Wasps are buzzing about 
her, seeing in this blonde head a hope of escape. 
Every time some one cries out in pain, a short- 
sighted soldier puts on his spectacles and peers 
about to see who it is. 

We are in a village. No church, no town-hall ; 
a nameless village. A ruined distillery still puffs 
forth its drunkard's breath. On a spur of hill 
overlooking the plain one sees two roads which 
cross — their juncture sealed, so to speak, by a 
spilt barrel of tar. Away off on the horizon, like 
toys set up for the day's game, bristle the poplar- 
trees of yesterday, some of them missing now. In 
the sun-drenched fields, straw-stacks, in whose 

.... 183 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

shelter move red and purple figures who have no 
liking for shrapnel, and look as if they were en- 
gaged in a ghostly game of puss-in-the-corner. I 
happen on Bardan and Devaux, who had been 
told I had a broken rib. They make me lie down, 
and treat me like a wounded man, though they 
try not to. 

The sun is hot: the crickets are chirping; memo- 
ries of maneuver-times creep back to deaden the 
reality of war. Some men of the Bicycle Corps 
are after nuts among the walnut-trees by the road- 
side, beating them with poles, and hugging close 
to the trunks whenever a shell comes along. From 
here it looks like a series of fights and reconcilia- 
tions between soldiers and trees. Every now and 
then one of us seizes a stick, hurls himself on a 
haystack and whacks it frantically; a shell-frag- 
ment has started a blaze. We look about for 
souvenirs, but, not knowing enough to select only 
the lightest part of the shell, — its aluminum fuse, 
— we come back to the village loaded down with 
shards of cast-iron. Through our field-glasses we 
see convoys drawn up on the outermost edge of the 
danger-zone. They form a sort of ring; evidently 
a circular battle is in progress. We see the horses 
browsing: we see a sergeant-major sitting in his 
.... 184 .... 



Sunday 

shirt-sleeves on a camp-stool; we see peace. Some 
artillerymen, who are disturbed because we are 
looking away from the enemy, begin to wonder 
if we have lost our sense of direction, and come 
up to turn our gaze eastward once more. 



II 

MONDAY 

Monday, September 7. 
On the road again. I am hunting for the flag 
which Flamond's company has just captured from 
the Germans. 

Night is falling. Stray soldiers trudge along in 
the ditches; they look as if they were dragging 
the laden stretchers which follow two hundred 
yards or so behind. After these latter trail some 
slightly wounded men who have invented this 
manner of getting to the relief station without 
bothering anybody with questions on the way. 
No dead men here, no dying ; this part of the battle- 
field near the hospital is kept cleared as a sanitary 
measure. The nearer haystacks and hedgerows 
are robbed of their wounded, just as the lower 
branches of an orchard are stripped of fruit. One 
sees motionless groups: stretcher-bearers who have 
felt their burden turn heavy all at once lower it to 
the ground, and go back for a lighter one. Tired 
feet drag along; in the distance a spasm of cough- 
ing; country night sounds. All those who have 
.... !86 .-. 



Monday 

been carrying on the day's fighting alone — mu- 
nition-convoy men, telegraphers — are streaming 
back to the village; you may know the peasants 
by the way they say "good-evening " to you. Then 
one begins to meet fewer passers-by. The road 
shoulders itself up above the fields, and there, far 
below me, spreads out the war-infested plain which 
the infantryman of to-day may only see by risk- 
ing his head above his loophole. From where I 
stand it already looks ravaged, with its ploughed 
fields in disorder, its scars, and all the odds and 
ends cast up by the earth when it covers dead men 
— caps, shoes — here a pair of suspenders spread 
out as if for sale, there a stiff hand reaching up 
out of a furrow. I plod along. The day will come 
when, looking back on this solitary walk after 
years in the trenches, I shall have much the same 
feeling as if I had walked one evening on the sur- 
face of the waters. 

Now we are on our way back, in three groups. 
The first is bringing Captain Flamond, dead with 
a bullet in his neck. His arms hang down, the 
fingers purple. Soldiers die with hands full of 
blood, just as writers die with ink-stained fingers. 
The men carrying him walk with broken step, 
just as they have seen the stretcher-bearers do. 

.... i8 7 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne ' 

Next comes the group with the German flag. (The 
men were uncertain as to whether they should 
stretch it over the captain's body, but they had a 
vague suspicion that this might not be the correct 
thing. Should they spread it under him, perhaps?) 
It is a great purple flag, black-starred, and deco- 
rated with a cross which we remove before the 
eyes of the prisoners who are following behind. I 
walk at the end of the procession with a Fahnrich, 
who is already trying to air his French, and turn 
his captivity to immediate account. Artaud points 
to me and says that I have been to Berlin. After 
that the fellow sticks to me like a burr. He comes 
from Berlin, it seems. I say nothing, but the smell 
and the accent of Berlin keep me company. 

Berlin, the only great city whose name brings 
with it no vision — toward which the soldiers of 
her enemies are drawn by vengeance alone! 
Berlin, all plaster and blue paint, where I arrived 
the morning of Hegel's birthday. The omni- 
buses, flag-bedecked, were whirling past in circles 
with the speed — and the clumsiness — of the 
sprightliest Hegelian thoughts. Out of the station 
with me poured such citizens of Magdeburg and 
Travemunde as had a weakness for Hegel, to- 
gether with peasant women of the Spree, in cos- 
.... X 88 .... 



Monday 

tume, whom I ran across again that evening, 
scattered among the beer-gardens. Once more I 
was to meet them all at Weimar, on Schiller's 
birthday, somewhat oddly celebrated in Goethe's 
town by a portly crowd in print dresses, whose 
spirits were already mounting higher at the 
thought of commemorating Goethe's birthday in 
Jena of all places ! I know why this prisoner from 
Berlin frets and looks disdainful when our three 
groups keep colliding with each other on the 
march. He considers the formation of our pro- 
cession poor. Frenchmen though we are, he re- 
grets that since we have prisoners we do not know 
how to make proper use of them to do honor to 
this war-time twilight. He is quite ready to put 
himself at the head of his men, carrying the nag, 
stripped of its cross, point downward. He is 
ready to make them sing — for they have a pris- 
oners' song with two refrains, one for use if one 
is victor, the other if one is vanquished. Poor 
Frenchmen, who have n't a hymn ready for life's 
every adventure — a hymn of friendship, of 
springtime, a hymn of the voyage a trois (what 
fun to intone them in the midst of enemies, 
or in full summer-time, or when there are but 
two of you!) — and who die, all of them, with- 
.... i8q •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Mame\ 

out ^knowing whether they are barytones or 
tenors! 

My German, hypocrite that he is, still tries to 
pass beneath the triumphal arch which stands 
unshattered in his mind — without the imper- 
tinence, however, of those French children in Ber- 
lin who used to run through that section of the 
Brandenburg Gate sacred to the Kaiser alone. He 
asks me, speaking very loud so that his men may 
hear, where Paris lies. 

"I don't know. I've never been there." 

Such is the tenuous veil which I cast over Paris 
to protect her from these thirty prisoners. 

"And my men? What province will they be 
sent to? Will the railroad cars be open? " 

All the prisoners ask this question. It is not 
that they want air; they want to see. It was the 
longing for travel which sent them all to war, and 
they are sadly disappointed at the idea of closed 
cars. They will be quite content if, from the win- 
dows, they can see our cities, and will turn impar- 
tially enthusiastic when our countryside grows 
too beautiful for their German hearts to bear in 
silence. One of them will be always on the watch 
that he may wake the whole trainful when there 
are Gothic churches, chateaux, and popiar-bor- 
.... 190 •••• 



Monday 

dered streams to be seen. Could anything be more 
delightful than this march under the open sky? 
The moonlight picks out the Frenchmen, one by 
one, for they go armed: but leaves the Germans 
to tramp along in darkness. Poor little French- 
men, with their mobile faces, each with his own 
rifle, his own life, whereas the German holds the 
life of the world in trust. . . . 

It is midnight when we come up with Captain 
Lambert, who is writing to his daughters while 
waiting for the bread convoy to arrive. He used 
to send one letter for all three of them, but since 
yesterday each has taken on a separate existence 
for him. Now he needs three envelopes. 

"Are we ever going to get bread?" he asks. 

All night long he will get up to put this question 
to cavalrymen, or despatch-riders, who will feel 
obliged, because of his rank, to offer him some 
chocolate or the remnants of a sausage. He al- 
ways accepts the gift, by the by. The rifle-bullets 
are making a tremendous racket; we have stuffed 
cotton in our ears to keep the sound out — all of 
us except the captain, whom we see jumping 
up every now and then, turning pale, and then 
settling down again. His agitation seems a bit 
absurd to us, just as Ulysses' excitement amused 
.... 191 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

the sailors whose ears had been stopped. I am 
keeping my spectacles on, so that I may not lose 
a moment of sky when I awake. 

Now and again, a blade of grass comes to life 
for an instant beneath my hand, against my 
cheek, and quivers like a woman's eyelash. Again, 
suddenly awaking, I see peering down at me a new, 
unknown face, the very sight of which wearies me, 
as if I were in some way responsible for it — as if 
I had to imagine for the first time goodness, suffer- 
ing, or sadness, according as the face is good, 
agonized, or sad. These are reinforcements, going 
forward to the charge. The cotton makes them 
believe that we have earache, that we are threat- 
ened with inflammation, or that our teeth are 
giving us trouble; sympathetic, yet annoyed that 
so much suffering must be, they go away, shrug- 
ging their shoulders toward God. 
* 

* * 

Four o'clock. Everything is silent. The burn- 
ing villages, with no one to watch them, flickered 
out sullenly before dawn. Cold, dew, everything 
that can turn a man's limbs to stone, has show- 
ered down on us out of the night. The quiet is 
astonishing. I remember the cotton in my ears 
.... 192 •— 



Monday 

and remove it, fearing that I have been reveling 
in an artificial stillness, but nothing is to be heard 
here save the tick of a watch, and over yonder a 
squeaking barrow. Never did day in war-time 
come on more noiselessly. Here and there, out of 
the ditches and furrows, men are stumbling up and 
rising to their full height, just as though there were 
no such thing as war; then, remembering suddenly, 
they crouch down again and try to straighten 
their cramped fingers out of harm's way. Not 
a word. No one wishes to give the day an excuse 
for beginning; no one will betray these hundred 
thousand men who are trying, in the dawn's glow, 
to pretend it is still night; no one brushes the dirt 
from his uniform, or grinds coffee, or starts off 
to fetch water. A soldier near by is unfolding a 
letter; the sound of the crumpled pages makes one 
think of bedtime at boarding-school, when the 
proctor, with one shoe already off, clicked his 
tongue sternly behind his curtains. Turpin is 
snoring again. Then suddenly the first cannon 
goes off, the shell goes wailing over our heads; and 
our little make-believe is shattered. 

I start forth to wake my scouts, who are scat- 
tered far and wide, like a shattered compass. They 
struggle up, growling oaths that gather force as 
••- 193 "". 



J Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

they go the rounds: Ah, Vingt Dieux ! Ah, MilU- 
dieux ! Their faces show swollen, moist, greenish, 
as though it had been necessary, to make them 
sleep, to hold their heads under water — in the 
river of oblivion, perhaps. Poor heads! Their 
mothers would take them between their hands, 
weeping, as though they had found them severed 
from their sons' bodies. One of them emerges from 
his dream before our eyes, as though he had fallen 
from Roanne or Vichy. 

"Why wake us?" they all ask. Then they re- 
member that they still have a crust of bread; that 
a couple of sardines still remain in that open box 
hidden under a tree: this modest bait suffices to 
lure them back into war once more. 

We have not even the poor consolation of re- 
laxing and stretching our limbs: the general in 
person has just taken up his position at our cross 
roads; his leopard-skin despatch-bag, swollen 
with papers, lies on the ground, and he kneels 
beside it, fumbling, like a priest consulting the 
entrails for omens. We are to attack, it seems. 
Major Gerard and his companies are to assault 
Nogeon. It was they who woke us in the night, 
wondering what had become of us. They struck 
lights the better to see us, and scrutinized us as 
.... 194 ..- 



Monday 

one reads a paper. Not having yet tasted battle, 
they kept asking civilians' questions: — - 

" Was Michal unconscious? Did he know he was 
dying?" 

Our four companies are now marching by, the 
dawn light falling full in their faces. Every man 
stands out sharply in the harsh glow — every 
hand, every feature; it is for no chance engage- 
ment they are arming us with all this light: a 
hand-to-hand fight is before us. Soldiers you have 
barely seen for a month come up, talk about their 
families, let you heft the weight of their lives, so 
to speak, give you a handclasp and then pass on, 
cheered afresh because they see you have faith 
in them. In the little lane by the orchard, each 
section narrows out in order to pass by the body 
of Captain Flamond as it lies there, stretched out 
under a cloak; the section halted nearest him out- 
lines his form, as it were, like the mound of earth 
that will cover him. 

The general takes each captain aside and shows 
him an order. All read quickly and bow assent, 
some smiling, others a bit pale — all except Viard, 
who has to have the maneuver explained to him 
on the terrain itself, the general making him 
count the poplar-trees, as though he were doing 
.... 195 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

the multiplication table. Perret, always methodi- 
cal and paternal, draws his men round him and, as 
is his custom, repeats the order to each one. 

"So much the worse for you," says he to a 
couple of late-comers. "Now you won't know 
anything." 

Then he makes every man hand over to Dol- 
lero the odds and ends taken from the Germans, 
"which would mean sure death if he were to 
fall into the enemy's hands. Dollero is soon cov- 
ered with helmets, spurs, and white sword-knots, 
striped with green. 

"What would they do to me if they took me 
prisoner now?" he remarks. 

Captain Jean passes on the order to his favor- 
ites; Viard, to his sergeants; Perrin, to the most 
intelligent; then off we go, led, according to the 
company we are in, by friendship, rank, or clev- 
erness. Halfway to Nogeon, a lieutenant of dra- 
goons asks Perrin for two subalterns to help cut 
off the stream of stray soldiers who are going 
and coming between the poplar-trees and Fosse- 
Martin. Mourlin and I are chosen. 

We follow the ditches by the roadside, stopping 

soldiers and questioning them. 
.... !q5 .... 



Monday 

"Where are you going?" 

"To the village." 

"What for?" 

They reply, guilelessly, that they are going to 
rest; and when we order them to right-about-face 
they look at us as though we had betrayed their 
confidence. A little ashamed of ourselves, we offer 
them a swallow of cool water. They drink, and, 
thinking they have got on the good side of us, set 
out again for Fosse-Martin. We take them by 
the arm, however, and swing them around to- 
ward Nogeon, which is in flames. They start off, 
the surlier spirits shrugging their shoulders. We 
keep on our way, using the haystacks for shelter 
and dodging this way or that, according as the 
shells come from Puisieux, or Vincy, or Bouil- 
lancy. At the foot of each stack we find some- 
thing to eat — leavings of the early breakfast: 
here a scrap of bread, there a spattering of jam; 
since they cannot in decency present us their 
wheat, the stacks offer what they have. A stack 
with a letter. A stack with an unexploded Ger- 
man shell, and, on the French side, the mocking 
emptiness of a wine-bottle. A stack from which 
two motionless boots stick out. Mourlin takes 

hold of one, I of the other; we pull, cautiously at 
.... I97 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

first, but we can feel that the soldier resists and is 
unwounded. He wriggles. He is wondering what 
he will catch if it is a colonel — two colonels, per- 
haps — tugging at his legs. Out he comes. He 
has been asleep there since yesterday. 

"Sneaks!" he says to us. "How much do they 
pay you to do their dirty work?" 

We let fly a box on the ears, a kick or two; he 
tries to defend himself, but gets a couple of 
whacks for his pains, and makes off toward the 
poplars, horribly offended. 

Along the roadside lie yesterday's wounded, 
overtaken by dawn and its shrapnel before they 
could get to cover. Here and there a soldier helps 
himself along with his rifle, the stock under his 
arm, the muzzle to earth. Groups of three, their 
arms entwined, struggle ahead, the most severely 
wounded man in the middle. They turn very 
slowly when some one calls to them; like Laocoon 
and his sons, they are hampered and tormented 
by an invisible serpent. We pass a mere boy of a 
corporal who seems to have strange ideas as to 
the fate of a wounded man, for he tries to give us 
a letter for his family. Over yonder lies a thread 
of blood which, instead of coming away from the 
fighting, leads toward it. Here are two soldiers 
.... I9 8 .... 



Monday 

of my regiment, greatly amused because the same 
bullet wounded them both — one in the head, 
the other in the foot. Mourlin sends them into 
convulsions of mirth by asking what the deuce 
they were doing together. We pass a little chap, 
in agony, who drops to his knees like a stricken 
beast when he reaches the end of his strength, and 
falls full length on the ground. After him a big 
fellow, walking slowly and evenly amidst all of 
his limping comrades, and taking infinite care, 
for he has a bullet in his lungs. In spite of this he 
flings himself down when a shell lands near by; 
then, inch by inch, rises again, as slowly as a child 
grows. Here is a lieutenant with his skull laid 
open, whose hand, groping for his eyeglass, flut- 
ters near his brain. Behind the haystacks which 
have been found out by the enemy's artillery lie 
heaps of terribly wounded men who, for fear of 
offering a better mark, drive away the less seri- 
ously wounded, as from a raft at sea. Some have 
stripped off their greatcoats and march along 
in their shirtsleeves, hoping that the Germans will 
not fire on them. Above all the groans a loud 
cry rings out; a wounded man has been hit a 
second time, and so there is a jet of fresh blood, 

a fresh vivid scream amid all this dull whimpering. 
.... I99 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

Then, all of a sudden, a regiment of reinforce- 
ments charges by in close waves toward Nogeon, 
sweeping the highway and meadows clear of 
wounded men for a minute, as if they had been 
miraculously healed and had fallen into step. 
Strange faces, all; and in war time one somehow 
thinks of every unknown soldier that he has no 
personal interest at stake — that he is fighting 
for one. The shadows of these newcomers cower 
to the left, away from the sun, and Nogeon re- 
ceives only faces and bodies lighted by the glare. 
They advance parallel with the road, and every 
man that falls drops into the line of the furrows. 
They enter Nogeon; almost immediately the dis- 
tillery sticks out tongues of flame. In ten min- 
utes it is all ablaze with a sullen fire, the tall 
chimneys doing their best with the smoke, out of 
sheer habit. The soldiers emerge again and with- 
draw to the rear; they are followed by stragglers 
— the braver spirits, and those who best resist 
the heat — a crimson-faced rear guard, leisurely 
withdrawing, and yielding the fire a bare ten 
yards. Out leaps a man from the very flames. 
Here comes another. . . . That is the end. Glow- 
ing papers and embers whirl about, the soldiers 
taking pains to catch them and put them out 
•••• 200 •••• 



Monday 

with a clap of the hands when they fall near an 
officer, just as children catch moths to please the 
mistress of the house. 

Our lieutenant of dragoons has come back at 
a gallop. He no longer has the same horse; neither 
has Danglade, who passes by with orders. Every 
cavalryman reappears on the battlefield with a 
mount which he knows and likes less and less, so 
that by nightfall the death of his horse affects 
him not at all. Again the little procession begins 
to trickle along over to the right of Nogeon; we 
must once more stop the poor fellows who have 
found a pretext for seeking a bit of rest. We 
requisition the services of a little corporal of the 
Sixtieth Regiment, a timid lad of twenty-two, who 
only ventures to accost the beardless soldiers, 
and who, instead of shouting his orders, runs and 
plants himself in the way of the man he is trying 
to stop, like a dog. We meet some wily deserters 
who pretend they have been sent for water, and 
have unfolded their canvas water-bottles. Others, 
more modest, ask only for a little shade. Here is 
a zouave who, to distract my attention, shows 
me a Prussian revolver and tries to lead me to a 
shell-hole a hundred yards away where, he says, 
a lot of Germans are still wearing their spec- 
.... 201 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

tacles. It is my turn to resist now. Then come 
some older men, with fine, hard faces, who find 
it annoying to be sent about their business by 
two whippersnapper sergeants. One fellow takes 
his revenge by fixing his eyes on Mourlin's nose, 
which the sun has turned bright red. (Every 
few minutes afterwards Mourlin asks for my 
pocket-mirror.) In this reflex there occasionally 
appears one of our own men, who says simply, 
"So-and-so has been killed." It costs one death, 
at least, to meet an acquaintance to-day. Here 
is a soldier, deathly pale, to whom I point out 
an aeroplane while slipping a rifle into his hand, 
just as one cajoles a child into eating soup. Now 
and then comes a liaison soldier, returning from 
the brigade full of hard words about the village, 
where he has found neither water nor bread — 
nothing but shrapnel and, more particularly, the 
general, who took him for a deserter and threat- 
ened him from afar with his revolver. He rushed 
up, waving his despatch-case, then fled without 
waiting for an answer. 

I" Well, let's be going on," say the others. 

We are holding the stray men we meet now. 
The lieutenant wishes to collect fifty or so, then 
bring them back in sections. Those who come up 
.... 202 •••• 



Monday 

are amazed at being received as though we ex- 
pected them, and take the places pointed out to 
them without a word. 

"Forward, march!" 

The lieutenant, who wants to be rid of his 
horse, simply lets him go, and we advance. The 
bullets are flying lower and lower, so that we 
must crawl. Now and then a man gets wedged 
between two huge beets and extracts himself 
with difficulty. 

Here we are at the poplars. We have fallen in 
with a company deployed as skirmishers, which 
receives us without enthusiasm in its ditch, for 
we have momentarily disturbed its comfort. The 
Germans are over yonder, thirty yards distant — 
among them a big fellow who rises up every few 
minutes; nobody can succeed in sniping him. This 
interests us newcomers exceedingly. There he is: 
a gray-green back suddenly floats above the tops 
of the beets. Two shots go off; up he bobs again. 
Many a Frenchman whose only sight of the enemy 
has been that poor jumping-jack. By evening, 
they get him. 

All is quiet again. This is the hour when the 
first lines on both sides, worn out, form the only 
neutral zone in all the two countries and do no 
.... 203 •«•• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

more than mount guard before the battle. Our 
second lines may snipe at the German second line; 
our cannons may blaze away at their howitzers, 
our civilians may hate their civilians: we shall 
not shoot. We reserve our wrath, rather, for 
a company of our own reinforcements, fifty yards 
back of us, which insists on taking us for wounded. 
The captain, greatly excited, shouts that he is 
coming to deliver us, and also keeps yelling, " Vor- 
warts! Vorwartsl" to stir up the Germans. Mour- 
lin, to calm them, yells still louder a German word 
which he wrongly believes to mean, " Quiet !" 
The two voices battle for the mastery, while the 
Saxons, fearing some trick, lie still before us, 
wondering what the French can be getting ready 
to do when they bellow forth in the Imperial lan- 
guage, "Peace! Peace! " 
Day has begun. 



Ill 

TUESDAY 

Tuesday, the 8th. 
The sun has set. For a while, however, we keep 
on firing along the furrows, just as one fires down 
the tunnel of a shooting-gallery at a country 
fair. A German aviator makes the most of the 
dying glow by coming to spy down upon my com- 
pany. Full five minutes he wheels over us. He 
does not miss a single gesture. He can tell 
von Kluck: "Mourlin is still sunburnt; Dollero 
is reading a letter which^begins, 'My angel boy'; 
Giraudoux is munching beets as he waits for 
night to come on with her armament." We close 
our eyes, starting sharply when our drowsiness 
clashes within us against sleep itself. No trenches 
here; we leave on the earth nothing save the im- 
print of our bodies; aboveground we still find 
that resignation and confidence for which we 
shall later have to dig deep, and still deeper. We 
have just had a visit from a soldier, an honest 
fellow who crawled up to us and halted there, 
.... 205 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

good-humored and smiling, his arms folded up 
under him like a dog's forepaws — risking his life 
to catch a centipede and throw it at us, its feet 
all waving frantically. Every now and then Jali- 
cot shouts, " Surrender!" to tease the Germans, 
who are unable to see the joke and reply, "No, 
no!" in throaty French, so that there will be no 
possible mistake. Then, in their turn, they call 
on us to surrender, and we reply, in chorus, with 
one single word. They are annoyed; did they 
not answer us politely? Over to the right, on the 
slightest pretext, blare the bugles of the chasseurs 
alpins, who are dimly to be seen standing on the 
sloping ground, like pines on a mountain-side. 
They are reservists — of a more musical turn 
than their juniors. An alarm shivers along the 
length of the French lines, and we fling ourselves 
down on our sides to fix bayonets, some of the 
men facing their comrades, others turning their 
backs. Beneath these stars, beneath the bullets 
which no longer meet the earth leveled out un- 
der the night, the impression occasionally comes 
to us of a brooding splendor beneath which we 
creep, infinitesimally small; we move leisurely 
about, like stage-hands, who, by gently agitating 
a sheet, simulate quiet water in the theater. 
.... 206 •••• 



Tuesday 

Midnight. We have buried ourselves in a pit, 
and those not on duty are joining us. Here comes 
the captain, the man of all men whom we are 
least eager to see, for he snores. As we lie all in 
a heap, our legs pinned down by heavy legs, un- 
known arms — we prefer not to know whose — 
embrace us. Now and again one defends one's 
head stubbornly against a knee, a shoe, another 
head. Sometimes a newcomer, not knowing that 
weapons have been laid aside, drops down on us 
with his rifle. Violent and anonymous kicks are 
launched against an unfortunate leg which turns 
out to be the captain's. A soldier down at the 
bottom shivers, giving the living mass a fever- 
ish motion; two late-coming guests, generously 
spread their cloaks over the whole crowded pit. 
An officer, on his rounds, orders us to get up; we 
answer not a word; whereupon he threatens us, 
so that our captain must needs stick out his 
head and command us, like our consciences, not 
to stir from our position. A soldier who has just 
been wounded stops near us, asks the way to the 
casualty station, and, in an outburst of generosity, 
places at the edge of our hole certain objects 
which he names as he lays them down: new knap- 
sack straps, some sausage, a knife. 
.... 207 •— 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

He is with us again in a minute. He has not 
found the casualty station; besides, he is suffer- 
ing a twinge of regret about the knife, which he 
takes back again. Before he has time to be off, 
the bullets are flying in gusts. From all four cor- 
ners of the plateau the machine guns are rattling 
like dead men's bones. One of our cannon is fir- 
ing wildly in the direction of Germany. The 
bugle-blasts of the chasseurs alpins ring out, then 
break off short, as though all the musicians had 
rushed forward to pick up a wounded man. One 
of the soldiers at the bottom of our heap tries to 
free himself; the others make themselves heavier, 
to keep him quiet. He keeps moving convul- 
sively, until, the resistance crushed out of him, 
he gives up. 

One o'clock. We are returning to Fosse-Mar- 
tin by the road — silent, sullen. Friendship keeps 
us close together, and each one leans on a com- 
rade, but we have developed an unspeakable 
obstinacy. No one yields an inch to any one 
else. Dollero tries to make me eat the bread he 
has left. 

"Eat this bread." 

"Keep it yourself." 

"You won't, won't you? Well, look!" 
»» 208 •••• 



Tuesday 

He throws it away; and God alone knows what 
bread meant to us that night. 

" Throw it away. I don't care.' , 

Then he sees that the rheumatism in my 
shoulder is not improving, and insists on carry- 
ing my rifle. We struggle. He hurts me. I hurt 
him still more, it seems, for I can see the tears in 
his eyes. 

Fosse-Martin! Out in the little square the 
wounded soldiers, their teeth chattering, do not 
know whether it is death or only the cold. To 
some of us they call for the doctor, to others for a 
blanket, a Seminarist who does not venture to 
say, "I am dying," murmurs, "I no longer exist." 
In the overtaxed hospital a delirious soldier is 
counting in a sing-song voice, and dies just as he 
reaches the number of his own years. On the 
road, an officer points with his finger to the light 
in the general's window, which is reflected in the 
horse-trough directly below it, and stupidly re- 
marks to his neighbor: " Really, it 's like Bruges — 
exactly like Bruges, you know!" 



The sky, the trees are dumb. Speech seems to 
have been withdrawn from the scattered brigades. 
.... 209 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

Never has it cost so dear to utter a single word; 
those soldiers who rise for a moment to stretch 
their arms seem to be apostrophizing the night 
in sign-language. One wakes up suddenly, stung 
by the cold on some unprotected surface of wrist, 
or calf, or neck, and wraps a handkerchief round 
the spot as one dresses a wound. The man nearest 
the snoring captain has been whistling softly for 
fifteen minutes, not daring to touch him. A 
telegrapher has tangled a sleeping comrade in his 
wire; for a whole half -hour he tries to work him 
free without waking him. Sleep everywhere — 
sleep, and that respect for life which one holds in 
times of peace. By way of reinforcement the dra- 
goons, as soon as they have tended their horses, 
come and fling themselves down to the rear of 
us, forming a second snoring line of sleepers. 

Four o'clock. I see a man who yesterday lost 
his dearest friend open vacant eyes, remember 
everything, and close them again. Sabots clatter- 
ing down the road, greenish light, an acid breeze 
— everything that used to fill your heart with 
despair in springtime, long ago, at the dawn of a 
day whose sweetest hours you had been tasting in 
anticipation — then you remember where you are. 

You get to your feet as though you had been 
.... 210 •••• 



Tuesday 

sleeping on the coping of a bridge, taking care 
instinctively to lean away from the direction of 
the battlefield. You see the frontier marked out, 
so to speak, by that chain of exhausted soldiers. 
For a second a wave of ingratitude sweeps over 
you toward all those civilians back in France who 
are thinking of you. Why must they exist? But 
for them, war would be beautiful. Then comes 
repentance, and, out of sheer affection for them, 
you begin to think of yourself with a tenderness 
much like theirs. "Poor old fellow/' you say to 
yourself. You call yourself by your first name, 
and by the nicknames they give you. Courage 
flows back into you, and you steal the best rifle 
and the best bayonet from the men who are still 
sleeping. A cheerful sergeant-major is waking his 
men by tickling them with spears of grass. " Hey, 
old sport," he says to each one, "take a look at 
your watch." The old sports open yellow eyes 
and leaden mouths which seem to engulf the very 
morning. Then, in the dawn light — a sundial 
without sun — our little matutinal cannon roars, 
while at the very same instant a big shell drops 
in from Germany, covering us with stones, dirt, 
and shreds of turf. The old sports stagger to their 
feet, cursing, and to-day begins. 

.... 211 «••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

A superb day. The sun leaps from cloud to 
cloud, gilding the one on which it rests for the 
moment. The sky is light blue with a few dark 
spaces. From those ash-trees yonder the shells 
are bringing down showers of foliage; autumn is 
at work upon them, too, but to her touch the 
yellowing leaves yield only one by one. No orders 
as yet; that means an hour of idleness. The road 
is full of lightly wounded men who had no wish to 
get lost during the night, tramping gayly along 
now, each with his splinter of grenade, or bullet 
just under the skin, where one can feel it. Here 
comes Trinqualard, shot in the left arm. In ex- 
change for the news that yesterday we took a 
hundred prisoners, he hands me over a real live 
German whom he is bringing back from Puisieux. 
We play with the fellow a moment; he becomes 
tame, and is anxious not to leave us. When a 
shell drops near by, however, he groans and be- 
wails his lot. We shout to him to be silent. 

"How can one be silent in such a war?" he 
replies. 

Now we are meeting new convoy men, new 

drivers who are under fire for the first time. They 

are tearing along, their eyes full of curiosity 

and dread, asking where the Germans are. Is it 

.... 212 •••• 



Tuesday 

the Prussian Guard? What are the commonest 
wounds? Are we winning? They wear little 
gaiters such as one sees in countries where there 
are snakes, and, in the midst of our dull life, they 
lead all day long a fevered existence, their iden- 
tification discs very much in evidence, rushing 
here and there to help carry any one's pack, 
any one's rifle — new servants of the battlefield, 
with the names of children, wives, relatives, 
everything they have to lose trembling on their 
lips; unexpectedly distributing tins of sardines 
and pineapple, and falling flat at the faintest 
breath from a bursting shell, as though they were 
lighter than we. 

The wind comes from the east; not one of our 
words will be carried toward the enemy, so we 
talk and laugh, heedless of noise. The cavalry- 
men, too, turn their horses loose when they have 
dismounted, and pay no more attention to them, 
knowing they can only wander among friends and 
that they can be caught again at Meaux, at Tours, 
or even at Bordeaux. The air is light. We expand 
in the freedom of it all, advancing as skirmishers 
through the fields in order to prepare the coming 
assault. We visit the haystacks and mounds, and 
from each one — just as one extracts a bullet from 
.... 213 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

under the skin by pressing on each side of it — 
we squeeze out a groaning German, wounded 
yesterday or the day before. There can be no 
vestige of doubt about these fellows: did we not 
wound them ourselves? We have pierced their 
lungs, their heads, their thighs, or — by way of a 
little Christian lesson — the palms of their hands. 
Each one of them trails along behind his own 
Frenchman, — a little clumsier, a little weaker 
than his leader, but scarcely less calm. The lips 
of both are a trifle greedy and scornful, for they 
have just traded tobacco and are sampling it. 

Our orders have arrived. The division com- 
mander has issued an urgent call for men who can 
speak Turkish. One need only know Turkish, it 
seems, in order not to be killed to-day. A last 
resort, this; for one has been searching in vain in 
the depths of one's soul for a single word — let 
alone a whole language — which will serve as 
talisman and save one's life. No one in our com- 
pany knows Turkish; no one, in a prodigious 
effort to live, suddenly acquires it. Horn knows 
Danish and offers himself rather hopelessly to the 
sergeant-major, who takes down his name. All 
day long he will be making trips to headquarters 
and coming back again — a poor spurned Hamlet. 
.... 214 •- 



Tuesday 

"Bergeot knows how to talk the Auvergne 
dialect," shouts Forest. 

Each one then airs the accomplishments of his 
friends. Jalicot, we learn, speaks the language of 
the Pions, who live at La Palisse; Charles knows 
Tunisian, Pupion the patois of Charlieu. Mas- 
seret makes sounds like a partridge, Dollero imi- 
tates a motor-bus. . . . Then the captain whistles. 

In five minutes we are off again toward the pop- 
lars. We get control of ourselves, we make every- 
thing ready; then, each man — as though, far 
from desiring a talisman against death, he wished 
to insist on his vulnerability — says good-bye to 
the captain in his very best French, and calmly 
writes a last post-card, reading it over when he 
has finished, for mistakes in spelling. 



IV 

WEDNESDAY 

Wednesday, the gih. 
The day has gone well. We were all happy and 
clear-headed. We have fought a good battle, just 
as we should have turned a good bargain or set a 
good table, in civil life, according to our respective 
trades. For the fourth time we are on the way 
back to Fosse-Martin, tattered and torn now, and 
bearing, every man of us, the traces of a hand-to- 
hand fight with the Germans or with the earth. 
As we lie here close by the corpses of those sol- 
diers from Nassau who tried to bar our way yes- 
terday evening, we think of to-morrow, when we 
shall spread a Saxon carpet over the earth. What 
a magnificent evening. The silence alone is enough 
to bring us to our feet again. For the first time 
to-day we are standing upright, feeling clumsy 
and overgrown — leaning for support against 
Captain Andre's stretcher as we try to learn to 
keep our balance all over again. Andre, facing 
the certainty of death, relieves his tormented 
fancy in questions; but as he is ashamed to talk 
.... 216 •■— 



Wednesday 

about himself, he pretends he is thinking of Cap- 
tain Flamond, who was killed on Monday. Where 
did they put Flamond's sword? — his despatch- 
case? Where was he buried? To which we reply 
as though Flamond, who cared less than nothing 
about all that, had become in the last hour of his 
life a fond, solicitous family man: his sword and 
despatch-case are already on the way back to 
Roanne, under seal; and Flamond, we swear, will 
be buried in a real coffin. 

Here we are back at the field hospital once more. 
On the very first stretcher lies Courtois, our 
reserve sergeant-major. We stop while he has a 
word with Chalton, the active sergeant-major, 
who talks down at him without bending over, for 
he has a bullet in his eye. "This is death to 
sergeant-majors!" they say, trying to laugh; then 
Courtois, shot through the lung, begins to worry 
about himself, and asks pointed questions to 
which we reply in vague terms, for we know that 
soldiers all about us, with shattered legs and 
pierced vitals, are listening to every word. To full 
a hundred men oxygen is being administered — 
they lie there gasping, far more like fish pulled 
out of the water than soldiers withdrawn from 
the battlefield. Beneath their collapsed faces lie, 
.... 217 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

withered and dead, the secrets that gave their lives 
value: road-menders who think no longer of roads, 
teamsters who have lost all interest in their carts, 
frank- visaged men whose eyes now leer. We have 
questions to ask of the soldiers of our own com- 
pany: — 

"What about Jalicot?" 

"He 's all right; but Vergniaud has been killed." 

"AndPupion?" 

"All right, but Bereire's dead." 

Tragic ransoms, these! What dead man's name 
is thrown into the balance against my name, if 
any one happens to ask after me? 

But Charles is calling us to the door of a little 
house. He has something to drink. What a curi- 
ous sensation to be in a room! Once the door is 
closed, our hearts swell until it would seem the 
four walls could scarcely hold them. We drink, 
and our dearest secrets come forth. Drigeard 
talks of his wife, Charles of his little daughters. 
Photographs come popping out of our pockets as 
though under some unseen pressure, and in this 
cramped space all the thoughts that were pent up 
during four days of battle in the open take form 
and shape again. It will be an heroic task to get 
them all back inside us again when the time comes 
.... 218 •••• 



Wednesday 

for us to leave the house, and I dare say one or two 
will escape, to haunt us all the evening. Charles 
thinks that the fighting will soon be over — one 
or two more engagements, perhaps, on the Meuse, 
the Somme, and finally on the Rhine. For though 
we are fighting in a countryside barren of springs 
and brooks, the rivers are already gliding into our 
conversation and persistently bestowing their 
names on our battles. . . . 

We have caught up with the captain at the 
crossroads. He has climbed up the steps of the 
little Calvary and hooked his arm around the 
wrought-iron cross, scanning the fields from this 
perch like a pilot. A company of soldiers is at 
work digging trenches in front of our ditch, and 
from time to time a head emerges just opposite 
me — always the same head, belonging to a fel- 
low with big mustaches who takes a fancy to me. 
When he feels I need livening up he showers me 
with dry earth and laughs. He hands me every- 
thing he comes across in his digging — a cricket, 
a piece of an old cartridge dropped by some hunts- 
man; he asks the name of a plant which he calls 
chevrebis. He has never known its real name, he 
says. Then he turns playful — like a dog retriev- 
ing pebbles, he throws me an empty can which he 
.... 219 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

gets back again on the head, to his huge delight. 
He can't resist digging his way in my direction, 
and pretends to telephone me through a root he 
has picked up. After every shrapnel explosion he 
disappears, to come back again with the names 
of the wounded, for everything with a name inter- 
ests him. He asks me mine. When Drigeard 
comes along with the coffee I pass him my steam- 
ing cup; in order to return it he climbs out of his 
trench and we find ourselves face to face, embar- 
rassed, like two people who, after corresponding 
for years without meeting, arrange a rendezvous 
at a railway station. My neighbor is bashful, but 
happy. He examines with great care the end of 
his root, and informs me that it is black acacia; 
then all of a sudden, as though he were missing a 
train, he leaps back into his ditch. Twice after- 
wards I see his head, never again the whole of 
him. 

Night is coming on; the regimental butchers are 
hunting a stray ox by trailing him along the line of 
trenches, which he could not cross. The* German 
howitzers, one by one, have held their tongues, 
only a little French field-piece continuing to 
use up the ammunition of its more indifferent 
brothers. Workmen and wounded soldiers stream 
.... 220 •••• 



Wednesday 

past under a fire of questions from the general, 
who cannot help showing warmer concern for the 
men shot in the arm than for those with leg 
wounds. With our elbows on the earth banked up 
before the trenches, we enjoy the scene before us: 
cavalrymen shrouded in their cloaks, volunteers 
coming up to the camp-fire to give their names for 
patrol duty, their heads all crimson in the blaze. 
Each man of us longs to have at his side the 
person who would respond best to such a night: 
the captain thinks of his father, Drigeard of his 
old head master, Dollero of Alfred de Vigny. 

From time to time an alarm flashes through the 
lines on its way from the Oise to the Meuse, and 
the rifle-fire crashes for a moment. . . . 
* 
* * 

Dollero has been restless since three o'clock. 
He is hungry; he wakes me by pulling away the 
knapsack with which he had wedged me into 
place. Drigeard gently rouses the captain, who 
is sprawling over his coffee-bag. Every one had 
gone to sleep last night on the most precious 
belonging of some one else, and we begin the day 
with apologies instead of brutally shaking one an- 
other into consciousness. I wander about among 

.... 221 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne \ 

my liaison soldiers, hesitating as to whom I shall 
pick out to awaken first, and finally selecting a 
man who seems to be sleeping uneasily — he has 
a good-natured face, too, and will be less likely 
to curse me. I lean over and pry open his eyelids 
with my fingers, holding them apart for a min- 
ute. . . . Sight slowly fills them. Then I leave him 
to arouse his comrades. 

For a full hour the silence lasts. The horses 
trail off to drink, and not a shell bursts near the 
watering-trough. Over yonder we see the artillery- 
men greasing their guns, crawling under them, 
hanging on the carriages little cans of paint or tur- 
pentine, as though to catch some beneficent resin 
from the cannon themselves. Such is the general 
peacefulness that the company cobbler accepts a 
boot and starts to repair it. The soldier who 
owns the boot stands in torment: suppose the 
battle were to break again at just this moment! 
A second man begins to unfasten his laces, how- 
ever, and a third kicks off both boots in anti- 
cipation. Not once, for a whole month, have we 
entered into a day, as one would wade into quiet 
water, with bare feet. Now the doctors are 
strolling up to our line; the heart of the village is 
no longer to be found in the hospital, but beats in 
•••• 222 •••• 



Wednesday 

our midst. Already the soldiers are taking up the 
work they had laid aside until peace should be 
signed — carving German gun-stocks, hammering 
out rings, gathering up shell-cases in baskets. Still 
not a sound from the cannon. 

The moment we had selected for the end of the 
war has already passed; we add another quarter 
of an hour, for good measure, then a half an hour 
— a whole hour — gradually accustoming our- 
selves to the idea of peace just as we shall, later 
on, regain the rear of the trenches through boy- 
aux which grow broader and broader, more and 
more generous. We do not dare guess what this 
respite may mean, though Artaud is of the opin- 
ion that all the Boches have been stifled by gas- 
shells. We no more dare look closely at this hour 
of ease than an alchemist dares peer into his re- 
tort after his fire has gone out. 

The captain is making over his regiment with 
six companies instead of twelve. We collect all 
the muster-papers which some unknown soldier, 
passing in the night, has slipped into our hands 
or laid on our bodies; we shake every faggot, 
every sheaf of wheat in order that not a name may 
escape; all told, we remain seven hundred men, 
three captains, six lieutenants. Henceforward we 
.... 223 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

may count on them all, for the stretchers are re- 
turning empty from their morning sally — all but 
one, from which a soldier shouts to us that he 
is the last of the wounded. Barbarin, who was 
bringing his Alsatian field journal up to date when 
the fighting began, resumes the work once more, 
and makes me spell out the names for him. 

"What was that village before Thann?" 

"Aspach." 

"And the village where we saw the chicken? " 

"Bellemagny." 

Rations are being distributed. It is a sour 
bread they give us, made of wheat that knew not 
the sun. We were counting on their bringing the 
usual two thousand rations, but the lieutenant 
of the supply-convoy, a man without bowels, took 
it for granted that death had been busy among us, 
and calmly cut down the rations to one thousand. 
Here comes Guillemard, in a motor-car, straight 
from the Invalides, whither he took our German 
flag. General Gallieni presented him with a medal 
and fifty francs. It was his first trip to Paris; he 
tells us that he was able to see the Eiffel Tower 
for at least ten kilometers on the way back, as he 
was sitting with his back to the chauffeur. He has 
no news at all; he forgot to ask how things were 
.... 224 •••• 



Wednesday 

going, and the general only talked to him about 
his family. Next time we send a flag to Paris we 
shall see to it that a newspaper, at least, is brought 
back to us. 

Seven o'clock. One of the other sergeants and 
I can stand it no longer. Off we go, by bicycle, 
toward the poplars that line the road to Nogeon, 
pedaling frantically. It is as though a dam had 
given way before us. Infantrymen, stripped to 
the waist and mounted on stray horses they have 
picked up, gallop along barebacked beside us, and 
instead of entering into conversation we find our- 
selves racing with them. Out in the fields soldiers 
are burying the dead in broad trenches, placing 
them close together, or separating them widely 
according to their ideas of what death means. If 
one of the corpses is too tall for the trench, they 
lay him in sidewise across the others, rather than 
bend his knees. The patrols are out scouring the 
country for saplings or heavy timber — accord- 
ing to the strength of their belief in God — to 
mark the graves, each man returning with unhewn 
wood to make a light or heavy cross. Little fires 
spring to life, in which they heat their bayonet- 
points red-hot in order to inscribe the names of 
the dead; dead horses, soaked with kerosene, are 
.... 225 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

blazing; sergeant-majors are parsimoniously dis- 
tributing quicklime and following us with hostile 
eyes, curious to know what business a mere ser- 
geant may have in front of the lines. Motionless 
cloud-shadows stain the fields like bruises. One 
and all the men are thin, haggard — reduced to 
a strange common likeness by the meager Biblical 
diet they have so long endured, with its dry, 
monotonous bread and meat, meat and bread. 
The silence is that deadly prehistoric calm that 
existed before the friendly little animals, such as 
cocks, birds, and cats, had been evolved. High 
and dry on a hillock, as though left there by a 
flood, lies an old ark of a cart, its wheels shat- 
tered; from under it a man with a limp arm is 
drawn, poor lonely soul. One catches the metallic 
clink of the identification discs which a soldier 
of the Engineering Corps is busy stringing on a 
shoe-lace, like some ghastly Chinese currency 
bartered for our dead. Yonder lie the unfamiliar 
bodies themselves, laid out in a row, each man 
with a leg doubled up, or an arm lifted, or a 
frowning eyebrow, or a head screwed obstinately 
to the side, as though by prearrangement, so 
that his best friend might recognize him by this 
posture. Wasted, ethereal beyond belief is one 
.... 226 •••• 



Wednesday ~ 

of them; and the grave-diggers recoil from bury- 
ing this ghost. 

At Nogeon, when we reach it, Major Gerard is 
at last discovered — he has been lying face-down- 
ward on the ground ever since Tuesday morning, 
and dies as they turn him over. We take the road 
to Vincy, quite deserted, involuntarily shrinking 
toward the right, where the dead Frenchmen 
lie thinly scattered. The mud-stained purple-and- 
red of their uniforms seems fresh and vivid now; 
their beards haVe grown; they were already veter- 
ans when they knocked at the gates of the next 
world. We seldom see their faces though; the 
colors of their uniforms contrive somehow to 
rise above their bodies and float over the tops of 
the beets. Here and there a bayonet sticks out; 
rifles flung aside during the assault stand upright 
in the earth. We see a dead man still on his feet 
who will fall to earth of his own weight, if help 
does not soon come; another has dropped across 
the tripod of a machine-gun: all these soldiers of 
France seem to have been stricken by lightning. 
But on the German side it has been a real mas- 
sacre; gray corpses, without weapons, their faces 
so dead-looking that they seem to have been 
killed after flinging themselves down to die; 
.... 227 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

heaped-up bodies, where the men lying beneath 
seem at times less dead than those on top. Did 
they rush to battle with instructions to be killed? 
At the foot of every poplar one sees bodies all 
shattered, as though they had fallen from the top 
limbs. 

But there go the bugles at Fosse-Martin. We 
must hurry back. 

Orders have arrived that we must hold ourselves 
in readiness — what for? To advance or to re- 
treat? Are we to fall back again on that dis- 
mal chain of Parisian suburbs or is ours to be a 
prouder objective — Soissons, Laon, Coblenz? We 
are wrung with suspense, like collegians at exami- 
nation-time. To ease the tension, we take a last 
walk to the hospital, empty save for one dying 
man, an object of deep interest to a group of 
soldiers with boils and sore fingers who have 
undergone the ministrations of the doctor this 
morning. 

But the bugle orders us on again; from the 
doorway I see Drigeard in the distance putting on 
his pack; he points excitedly down the village 
street, his gesture seeming to indicate the high- 
road beyond, and to say — I still shudder at the 
memory — that we are going to retreat. 
.... 228 -- 



Wednesday 

But he is pointing to the general, on horseback, 
his arm stretched out towards us, waving us for- 
ward. 

* * 

The tree which blocked the road has been cut 
away; the poplars stand stripped at the edge of 
the sidewalk, like raised barriers at a grade-cross- 
ing. Whistles sound forth to call back the more 
eager spirits, who have crossed the embankment 
and are proceeding cautiously, entering the open 
country as one fords a stream. We are off at last 
— but the general staff has reckoned the time of 
starting, and the distances, as though our regi- 
ment were unchanged; our two battalions are lost 
in a roadway too large for them. Disregarding 
the mile posts, we close up between more modest 
boundaries. 

It is like setting out for a second war. We 
scarcely know where we are. The survivors of 
the companies which have suffered most heavily 
have been distributed among the others; they 
cling together, however, and confusion results. 
Big men, little men, all haphazard; Berquin, the 
huge fellow who towered like a column in the 
distance, now stands only ten yards away from us, 
■— 229 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

making us feel that our eyes are playing us tricks. 
This same relentless far-sightedness shows us dis- 
tinctly the officer at the head; and every soldier 
whose face was formerly a mere blur has developed 
real features, which scrutinize us. Beards and 
hair have grown long. Boots and gaiters, parched 
and ungreased for days, look as though they en- 
cased dead limbs. In one section silence prevails; 
the garrulous spirits have all been killed. In an- 
other, the same fate has evidently met the good- 
natured men, for the faces of the survivors are 
dour. Every one is thinking intensely of himself; 
the cooks, overabundant now, are painfully aware 
that they will be transferred to some other task; 
orderlies whose officers have been killed are 
sharply on the trail of other officers who have lost 
their orderlies. The company horse is seized upon 
by a second lieutenant who, poor rider that he is, 
imitates instinctively the gestures and manner- 
isms of the dead captain. During the halts one 
starts, by mere force of habit, to look for absent 
comrades, absent officers, until one finds one's self 
all alone, and hastens for consolation to the rear 
of the regiment, where the changes have been less 
sweeping, — where one still finds Doctor Mallet, 
and Laurent, and all those friends who have suc- 
.... 230 •••• 



Wednesday 

ceeded in keeping body and soul united; and the 
horse from Ramonchamp, too, which can't be 
caught and follows us unbridled, — everything, in 
short, that was permanent in our past. 

The poplars have been left behind on the right; 
we are going to follow the battle-line of the 
Seventh Army Corps to the other side of Bouil- 
lancy. Propped against the grassy embankment 
on either side of the highway lie corpses, with- 
drawn by loving hands from the hard surface 
where they fell so cruelly. During the halts we 
mingle with them, sitting or sprawling full length, 
until the whistle blows and we alone struggle to 
our feet, as though enacting some unfair Last 
Judgment. We glance idly through the registra- 
tion books of these dead men, to see what punish- 
ments fell to their lot while they were in barracks. 
It is surprising to learn how few of them knew how 
to swim. At the crossroads we come across dead 
cavalrymen, for it is the fate of the cavalry to 
fall wherever the roads form a sunburst. Bouil- 
lancy is in ruins. From the tottering houses the 
soldiers have removed whatever furniture remains 
and set it out in the courtyards — tables, chairs, 
wardrobes, a few mirrors, and an occasional pic- 
ture flat on the ground. The plan of the house is 
.... 231 •••• 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

sketched anew — all it needs is a roof. But now 
the dead begin to follow our lines, turning all at 
once toward the road, northward; it is following 
this meridian that we come out of battle. 

All our dead are on the road before us, lightly 
laden, eased of their packs. We are purged of 
desires and of memories. Stirrings of curiosity, 
however, rise in each of us to know the most terri- 
ble thing the next man has seen. When we hear 
we look at one another in amazement. The experi- 
ences I have been through seem perfectly unreal; 
but what my neighbor is telling me seems stark- 
true, and I shudder as he relates horrors which are 
far less horrible than some of the things I have 
borne without shuddering. What an atrocious 
tongue do we now speak! Every question pro- 
vokes a ghastly answer, as though that barrier in 
our minds which separates reason from madness 
were growing constantly more frail, as French and 
Germans come closer and closer to grips. What is 
that glow over yonder? It is our wounded soldiers 
burning to death at Nogeon farm. What are all 
those little black spots? Children trying to escape 
from a rain of shells. In the depths of our natures 
lie our old civilian selves, like things lifeless and 
without charm. Dollero no longer loves his petite 
.... 232 •••• 



Wednesday 

amie, has no intention of marrying her. Mourlin 
is weary of his school; and what does the Major's 
secretary, the worried professor of the history of 
art now care for Bourges or Sainte-Trophime? 
His gaze is vague, deadened; malice and candor 
have been dashed from his eyes like glass from a 
church window. His spectacles, too, are broken. 
He walks on the tips of his heavy boots, his feet in 
torment, taking all the precautions of a pedestrian 
who has been traveling for days over bad ground. 
Will the marble and granite of Saint-Remi de 
Reims, Vezelay, Issoire ever bloom anew for him 
in the blessed light of evening, as the strange 
dried flowers of Japan unfold in summer in their 
dish of water? Where, after peace has returned, 
will he reopen his dinner-table offensive against 
the Gothic, cocking gayly the Romanesque arch 
of his eyebrow? At present his only thought is 
that he used formerly to march on the left side 
of the road, whereas he must now walk on the 
right; and that, after all, he does n't care, for his 
boots will wear out evenly. 

Here is a great hole filled with cut stone; a sign- 
board reminds us that it is called a quarry. Here 
are some trees which do not space themselves out 
monotonously at our approach — each oak guard- 
, •- 233 ■"■ , 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

ing its beech, each beech its ash, with an encircling 
ring of alders and birches : this is a forest. The sky 
is cloudless blue, the winds have been appeased, 
and the terrified season is beginning to take heart 
once more. We are drenched with sunlight; in- 
stead of lavishing itself on soulless verdure alone 
autumn bestows its golden favor on our regi- 
ment and, as we march down the slopes, leaving 
yesterday's arena far behind, it dries and warms 
us in our draggled greatcoats, that are all white 
with mud like flies escaped from a sugar-bowl. At 
every turn of the road, in every patch of wood, 
it gives back to us one of those common things 
whose very existence we had forgotten — a house, 
a brook, a church, — and we seize on them gladly, 
as though they had been lost forever. The modest 
fellows who used to walk with their eyes on the 
ground in days of peace, and often find a small 
coin for their pains, come upon a railroad to-day, 
or a pond, and we recover too, one by one, a train 
of domestic animals, hungry, lost, determined to 
follow us — sheep, goats, oxen, that come bleat- 
ing and lowing behind us. By some deserted 
cottages a man with an eye for flowers finds 
ivy-geranium, autumn-stricken; zinnias, wither- 
ing balsam, and here and there the surprise of a 
.... 234 .... 



Wednesday 

full-blown rose. We pass finally three wardrobes 
taken from a village by the Germans and hastily 
abandoned by the side of the road, where they 
hold up their mirrored doors, so that every man of 
us has a chance to stare, three times over, at a 
haggard, cadaverous countenance which he recog- 
nizes at last for his own. 



V 

THURSDAY 

Thursday, the ioth. 
Great bars of light shoot up from the west — 
from a sunset such as one sees when journeying, 
late of an afternoon, along the favorite route of 
Louis XIV, le Roi Soldi, from Charly to Versailles. 
The fighting must surely be over now, for the com- 
mand is taking away from us all those little privi- 
leges which are granted the infantry while battle 
is in progress. We are forbidden to shoot at Ger- 
man aviators, forbidden to scour the country- 
side in patrols when our curiosity is roused, for- 
bidden to ride on stray horses. They take away 
from us a victoria which we had gathered in. We 
have survived our usefulness. 

Just before we get to Levignen, however, the 
dragoons consign to us the personnel of a Ger- 
man hospital. The pharmacist, one Magnus, used 
to live in Paris, so he is the spokesman. Among 
the belongings of the doctors we make some in- 
teresting discoveries. 

" What are you doing with this bust of Carnot? " 
.... 236 •••• 



Thursday 

"IsthatCarnot?" 

"What are you doing with these children's 
shoes?" 

"For our own little darlings. They're beauti- 
ful shoes." 

"Bergeot," we shout, "come and look at these 
doctors!" 

When we are displeased with a prisoner we 
call Bergeot to come and look at him. Bergeot 's 
eyes are red and steady. He draws near and 
for a whole minute tortures Magnus with his 
stare. 

In Levignen, which has been mined by the 
Germans, two sudden explosions go off. Bergeot 
returns to Magnus. Another explosion. Bergeot 
lays a heavy hand on the German's shoulder. 

"That's not treachery," Magnus explains, 
"it's the lottery of war." 

"Shut up." 

"It's the destiny of arms." 

"Shut up, will you!" 

"I do shut up. I am obliged to . . ." 

Bergeot, satisfied now, informs the other pris- 
oners that we have captured a German flag, and 
points to the company marching past. The men 
are thickset, grim; the Germans would be im- 
.... 237 .». 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

pressed if it were not for poor Lieutenant Tan- 
cliat, who, on horseback for the first time in his 
life, rides far to the side of his saddle. With one 
word I set him straight in the estimation of my 
captives: — 

"That is the lieutenant who killed General von 
Sastrow." 

As a matter of fact he has killed no general, 
least of all General von Sastrow, who was past 
eighty-five when I visited his collection of foot- 
prints in marble at Munich. Magnus, however, 
turns white when Tancliat, nobly urging for- 
ward his steed by slapping its ears with the reins 
and its quarters with a switch, his left foot 
searching wildly for a stirrup irretrievably lost, 
draws up to our group and stretches out to me 
his death-dealing hand. I delay a few seconds to 
grasp it so that the Germans may see how white 
and well-kept it is. 

Capricious night is unwilling to come on alone, 
so it brings rain with it. The beer-bottles which 
the Germans left standing by the roadside will 
be half-full of water to-morrow morning. With 
the rain the past awakes within us, for it has 
rained only once or twice since war began, and 
our memories of the last downpour of peace-times 
.... 238 •••• 



Thursday 

are as vivid as those of some tremendous phe- 
nomenon like an eclipse. The last time it rained 
I was drinking sticky white wine at the Cafe 
Helvetique. I had just read in the newspaper 
a lampoon against the mayor. The time before 
that, I was at the wedding of my friend Jusse. 
Once, too, I saw Quebec and Naples in the rain. 
I even remember the first time it rained — that 
day I cried. Levignen is almost deserted. We are 
quartered in a great prosperous farmhouse where 
we go about establishing order — for the Germans 
have just left it. Upstairs, they ransacked all the 
drawers for photographs of young girls which 
they stuck into the frames of mirrors, so that 
their ugly faces were reflected in the centre of 
these circles of innocence. We fold the women's 
underwear, replace the stoppers in the bottles, 
hang up the dresses. We are calm and me- 
thodical as if instead of defeating the Prus- 
sians, we had won some sort of a victory over 
ourselves. 

Prosper passes on horseback. I had not seen 
him since Thann. His eardrum is perforated; 
and, to keep on the good side of him, I have to 
keep moving as his horse wheels. He tells me 
that he did not dare turn over the corpses from 

.... 239 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

my regiment when they seemed to be about my 

height. 

* 
* * 

The Germans have invoked the aid of fog, 
cold, and rain, — anything that may check the 
pursuit for a few moments. Are we giving chase, 
or are we not? Dawn is coming on and we are 
getting restless. Fortunately we find ourselves 
before a comfortable middle-class house which 
amuses us for an hour or so. First we rest our 
backs against it, then we inspect it with as much 
curiosity as will our descendants in the thirtieth 
century, walking about through the rooms in 
groups. Here is a room with a sideboard; that 
is where they dined. In another room, two beds; 
evidently they slept there. A third room contains 
a tall lamp and upholstered furniture — the 
scene of intimate family gatherings where the 
weather was discussed. We slip on the waxed 
floors, just as one slips in a museum; we revive 
childhood memories in the shadowy pantry, in 
the well of the staircase, dark-rooms which reveal 
long-forgotten films. Coming out, we see brown 
fields where a territorial, trying to hasten his 
work under stress of the mobilization, broke two 
.... 240 •••• 



Thursday 

ploughs and left them sticking in the earth. Our 
only real distraction is a soldier from Peaupie 
who has lost his memory, and whose comrades 
are making merry by supplying him with false 
recollections. 

"Don't you remember those two Uhlans you 
killed at Mulhouse?" 

"/ killed two Uhlans?" 

He insists that his adventures be written down 
as they are told him, protesting, however, when he 
is informed that he was seen eating half a pound 
of Bavarian soldier. 

The Sixtieth Regiment swings past us, bound 
for Crepy-en-Valois, the band leading and setting 
a pace which brings murmurs from the rear. The 
musicians, who were carrying the wounded all 
last week, find their instruments light by com- 
parison. Colonel MacMahon rides ahead. We 
pretend to be surprised at this. 

"Hello! So you've still got your colonel, have 
you?" 

They reply, apologetically, that he has been 
lightly wounded. 

Off again. We cut across the ploughed fields 
in order to get past the rest of the brigade on the 
Gondreville highroad. Another halt. The gen- 
.... 241 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

eral calls for the colonels and majors; captains 
and lieutenants answer the summons. These 
latter, coming back, call in turn for company and 
platoon commanders; sergeants, corporals, and 
even privates present themselves. Maps are dis- 
tributed to the officers. On map No. 32 the place 
where our fighting took place is no longer visible. 
We see the forest of Villers-Cotterets, V-shaped, 
" the first letter of the word Victory," says the gen- 
eral, scanning the forests on the other maps for 
the rest of the word — in vain. We advance again. 
On the banks beside the road lie big mushrooms, 
uprooted; others, much smaller, stand erect: they 
have grown there since the Germans passed. 

Gondreville. Straddled on the top of a wall 
ride two urchins, who wave their hats and urge 
forward their imaginary steed whenever a horse- 
man goes by. One feels, somehow, that on the 
other side of the wall some big person has hold 
of their feet, and keeps them from tumbling off. 
On the balcony of a forester's house stand two 
small girls. Are the villagers trying to accustom 
us, little by little, to the sight of civilians by 
showing us their children first? They call to us, 
throw us bacon and bread. The cannon are thun- 
dering ahead. "Oh, that's nothing! It's only the 
.... 242 •••• 



Thursday 

battle ending!" cry the little girls. They jump 
up and down with excitement. They stretch 
their hands through the railing in order to touch 
our hands; then their arms come through, then 
their shoulders. As we go by we pull their hair 
gently, make believe get tangled in it in order 
to stop a moment and squeeze their tiny noses, 
pinch their cheeks. 

The cannon never stop. We stumble into the 
cavalry, which has come to a halt. "Oh, that's 
nothing!" the little girls are probably thinking, 
"it's only the battle beginning again." As we 
sit in the moss, exhausted, we call in the services 
of fire to enliven us. We pour coal-oil on a nest 
of wasps and touch a match to it. We pour out 
the powder from some German cartridges and set 
it orl. We light the corner of a three-months-old 
newspaper which Jalicot is reading. Fire is the 
only gayety, the only fooling we have at hand, 
and, as matches are scarce, we must needs pass 
them from hand to hand, playing swiftly. Sud- 
denly, out of the forest, comes a boy of fourteen 
on his bicycle, bringing us wine and ham. He is 
from Vaumoise, where the Prussians lived for ten 
days; the bicycle he rides belonged to his brother 
of sixteen, whom they killed. They shot every 
.... 243 .- 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

child they saw on a bicycle. He hurries off post- 
haste to fetch us something to drink (Vau- 
moise is only six kilometers distant) and as he 
turns on his wheel to call good-bye, he tumbles 
off. His poor knee is scraped raw, but he starts 
on again. A second boy soon appears, then two, 
three more, until from the woodland roads come 
forth all those who risked death at Prussian 
hands, — they, grow older and older, so that, as 
we emerge from the forest, we are scarcely sur- 
prised to find two ancient beggars. We ask them 
for matches; clumsily they make the unaccus- 
tomed gesture of giving, blushing with confusion 
and joy as they do so. 

Vauciennes. The sun is dazzling. The road 
curves and curves, till our heads begin to spin. 
Once in the village, we hug close to the houses 
like sheep who fear to go astray, until we come 
to a Uhlan stretched out on a sheaf of straw 
before a garden gate, who makes us turn out. 
He has got a bullet in the breast and the death- 
agony is upon him. His eyes are open, and for 
full ten minutes he sees our faces peering at him 
as we march by. If he lives another hour, he will 
see every man in the division. He watches us, 
fully conscious, amazed that among a thousand 
.... 244 •••• 



Thursday 

soldiers there is not one brute to insult him; he 
has almost enough confidence in us to close his 
eyes. A little farther on, to the left, a Prussian 
cuirassier is also stretched out; but one must be 
anxious indeed to see an enemy die to take the 
trouble to cross the street. The Prussian there- 
fore meets death alone, moaning. 

It is eight o'clock. We are at the gates of Vil- 
lers-Cotterets. The first houses seem empty. 
Our dragoons circle about them while the patrol 
knocks at the doors or rings the bells — cere- 
monious, if you like, but are we not in France? 
Finally, there is a noise at the upper windows; 
the shutters open slowly, and our rifles go up. It 
is only a good Sister in a starched cornette, how- 
ever, who sees us, lifts her arms to heaven, and 
cries: — 

"They've gone, the dirty pigs, they've gone!" 

We hear her coming downstairs, stumbling 
over empty bottles in the hall. 

"How the brutes guzzled! Do you want some- 
thing to drink, boys?" 

She kisses us, knocking off our caps with her 
cornette as she does so. Then she spies words 
written in German across her window-shutters. 

"Ah, my dear boys! Wipe it off! No; wait! 
.... 245 »* 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

I'll do it myself. No, let me! Don't dirty your 
handkerchiefs!" 

Poor handkerchiefs which we have pulled out 
of our pockets, all mud and rust! They bring 
the tears to her eyes. We, who have gone so long 
without seeing civilians that we have forgotten 
to answer when spoken to, stand about in silence, 
stupid and embarrassed. The rest of the com- 
pany comes up the ditch — an impressive spec- 
tacle for a Carmelite nun, for we are keeping the 
lances of the hussars and cuirassiers who have 
been killed or taken prisoner, and collections of 
sword-knots hang from our belts. Our great- 
coats are in a lamentable state; the buttons in 
front have burst, those in back have been cut off 
by the men who march behind us. The leather of 
our accouterments has been worn away by the 
earth, as if by pumice-stone. The Sister runs up- 
stairs to get a brush, but when she comes down 
we have gone. 

We are past the isolated houses now — well 
into the town. The inhabitants are already pour- 
ing out. After so many deserted villages, so many 
empty towns, the sight of these people who have 
lived on in the heart of their city, surrounded 
by a circle of empty houses like water-beetles 
.... 246 •••• 



Thursday 

protected by air bubbles, wrings our hearts. They 
come running up shouting, a little surprised at 
the noise of their own voices after twelve days 
of deadly silence. The householders returning to 
their abandoned homes stop on the doorstep, 
key in hand, and wave to us, forgetting even to 
enter; they wave handkerchiefs instead of the 
hats which are locked up inside — for more than 
a week now they have gone bareheaded. Little 
girls, matrons, and old women ... we have a 
curious impression of recognizing each one of 
them, when it is really only the ages that we rec- 
ognize. The women would detain us, the men urge 
us on: — 

"Come and rest a while. Let the Germans 
run!" 

"Go after them, boys. You've got them 
beaten!" 

The last of the enemy, they say, left only an 
hour ago. We quicken our step; the artillery has 
caught up to us now, crowding us to the right side 
of the road, and in its rumble the army seems 
to have found its true voice. The townsfolk 
must have been preparing for this moment; on the 
balconies of the houses appear old servants with 
flags made in secret. All Villers-Cotterets must 
.... 247 — 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

have been busy in the cellars for a week past, 
sewing together every scrap of red, white, and. blue 
to be found; but when they see how haggard and 
cadaverous we look their one thought is to feed 
us. Only one old gentleman sticks to his window, 
taking photographs without end, All his plates 
will soon be gone, for if he had his wish he would 
take the picture of every soldier. When one of us 
turns toward him the temptation is too great, 
and the click is heard. 

"Ah, if you could only make a group! " he cries. 

From the windows they hand out everything 
that remains in the larders, hastily, as if to save 
it from Germans in the courtyard. The children 
run back and forth between us and the doorways, 
helping on with the good work. A lady who does 
not belong in this street follows us, distributing 
chocolate, but only bit by bit, so as to have a 
pretext for staying with us to the end. 

"When did the Germans leave?" we ask. 

She thinks we are fishing for a compliment. 

"Yes, indeed," she declares, "you beat them, 
no mistake! Oh, you poor fellows!" 

In the distance we see townspeople hurrying 
to scratch or rub off German inscriptions before 
we pass by; carrying away empty bottles, pick- 
.... 248 •••• 



Thursday 

ing up garden-chairs, setting all the German dis- 
order to rights, as though we did not know that 
the enemy had been there. Occasionally there is 
an outburst of sympathy for some particular sol- 
dier among us: — 

"Oh, look at the big dark fellow! See that red- 
haired one!" 

They restrain themselves, however, and the 
favored man receives not a whit more than his 
comrades. From every window come cries: — 

"What do you want most?" 

"Matches," we call back. 

A handful of matches is distributed among us 
forthwith, each receiving two. The last man even 
gets three. Such is luck! 

"Give us soap!" 

Out it comes, square chunks of yellow soap, 
then little cakes of toilet soap, then fragments 
that have already seen use. Old gentlemen ask 
the numbers of the regiments following us ; deep 
down in their hearts, perhaps, is a wish that 
they might have been delivered by their own 
sons, or grandsons, or sons-in-law — but after all, 
what difference does it make? They follow us 
a moment, out of politeness, asking whence we 
come. 

.... 249 .... 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

" From Alsace." 

Now they become a bit more ceremonious. 
How splendid, they say, it must have been when 
we entered Mulhouse! And what were the num- 
bers of the regiments with us over there? 

Old women trot along beside us, offering sugar, 
piece by piece. We are shrouded in our great- 
coats so they can recognize no one, and, as they 
keep about the same pace as we without realizing 
it, they give continually to the same man. In 
their starched aprons and fluted caps they eye 
our dirt and rags with humility. They could do 
our washing, they say, if only we were to be quar- 
tered in town. Finally, during a short halt, they 
come out with the question which has been tor- 
turing them: — 

"You've had some men wounded?" 

"Yes." 

"And some killed?" 

"Yes." 

They dare not ask us the exact number. They 
feel the number of the victims growing in their 
imagination. Perhaps there were ten, fifteen, 
twenty — good Heavens, were there thirty?" 

"Five hundred," says Bergeot. 

They are horror-struck. Bergeot says that per- 
.... 250 •••• 



Thursday 

haps he was exaggerating, and their slow- working 
minds set to work saving a few survivors from 
those five hundred: ten, fifteen, twenty. It almost 
seems as if those whom they had first given up for 
dead were being restored to them. Ah, if only 
they could save thirty! 

We are off again. From one place we get only 
children's belongings — it was the primary school 
— little handkerchiefs, little pots of jam, little 
rolls of bread. Farther on a woman has saved 
some wine and pours it out for us by the quart. 
In the middle stands a workman waving a bottle 
and pouring its contents into our flasks. 

" Drink it, go on and drink it," he says. 
"They've killed my son. It's Byrrh." 

"Why not keep some for yourself?" says 
Bergeot. 

"Drink it; they've killed my son." 

We each of us accept only a drop or so; it won't 
take him ten minutes to get rid of it all. We hear 
him in the distance repeating the same words, 
then calling to his wife. We have not the heart to 
turn round and look at her. 

We have come to well-paved streets now; the 
countrymen walk on them more cautiously, as 
on a waxed floor. To the left rises a high wall with 
.... 251 »« 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

a baker astride it, passing hot loaves of bread out 
to us in a determination that his side of the street 
shall not be outdone in giving by those across the 
way. A civilian who has followed us into town 
rushes ahead of us, and flings himself into the 
arms of weeping parents. Shamefaced tradesmen 
and solid bourgeois loom up in our path; they feel 
dishonored, contaminated by the invasion, and 
will long keep their downcast looks, for they have 
had to hold their tongues for a fortnight — when 
they venture to address us it is with hesitating, 
high-flown expressions: — 

"Pray believe," says the mayor, — "pray be- 
lieve in the high regard of . . . regard of ... Ah! 
do believe in it!" 

The town urchins, swarming everywhere, help 
move the army along by pushing at the gun-car- 
riages. We pass a poor old official who forgets for 
the first time in his life to be proud of the tablet 
on his house, where Alexandre Dumas once lived. 
He is covered with confusion at mistaking for a 
machine-gun our flag in its leather case. A priest 
is distributing tablets of chocolate, as he would 
bestow sacred medals. Every young girl has her 
specialty: one pours eau-de-cologne on our hands, 
or on our heads if we wish; another watches us 
.... 252 •••• 



Thursday 

with eyes full of tears; another calls at the top of 
her voice to a woman in the house, invisible to us, 
who keeps passing cheese and preserves out of a 
small window. Here is an empty building all 
spattered with foreign words, which looks as if it 
were full of Germans. Every now and then we see 
a child or an old woman putting a bird cage or a 
pot of geraniums back on the window-sill. There 
stands a man in a frock coat, stern- visaged and 
silent, who is probably suffering remorse for hav- 
ing spoken to some Prussian officer, for not hav- 
ing told him lies enough. He drops to his knees to 
help me adjust my gaiter, stiffened and mouldy 
as an old piece of bark. 

Others there are who have been thinking only 
of this deliverance, who rejoice at having waited 
for us unflinchingly, who speak frenziedly to us 
and cry forth their dearest thoughts from afar, 
because we have not disappointed their trust 
in us. 

"I have two sons!" 

"I am engaged to be married !" 

The neighbors look in amazement at this young 

girl who for the first time blazons abroad her love. 

A school-teacher hastily jots down our addresses, 

that she may write our mothers, and pours her 

.... 253 ■••■ 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

pity and condolence on Dollero, who must give 
his father's address, his mother having died when 
he was still a child. The dogs, chained during the 
German occupation, begin to bark. When un- 
leashed they instinctively recognize the soldiers 
and follow them. 

One building more, and we shall have crossed 
the town. It is the Old Men's Home, the first 
structure to meet the German invasion. The 
Sisters have not allowed a single inmate to come 
out — there are too many horses abroad — but 
the porte-cochere leading into the big court is wide 
open, and the old men are lined up inside, taking 
precedence by age, no doubt, for the first rows 
are seated. Those behind, more robust, totter on 
benches. They wear a tawdry light blue uniform 
which, by all rules, would have made them in- 
visible if they had been fighting. They wave 
their hats feebly — a touching signal — but this 
blocks the view of the gaffers in the rear, who pro- 
test; they stop then, and bareheaded (all except 
the frailest, whom the Sisters oblige to keep on 
their hats) content themselves with quavering 
out "Vive la France"; or, if in their youth they 
were tender-hearted, they simply weep. For these 
old men this was a real invasion; one week more 
.... 254 .- 



Thursday 

of it, and some of them might have died in the 
enemy's hands. A Sister passes the star inmates 
of the Home their old medals, and they pin them 
on with fumbling hands, afterwards stroking their 
beards with a proud little gesture as if to say 
to us: — 

"See! I saved a child's life"; or, "I was in the 
Crimean War"; or, "I was employed twenty-five 
years by the same firm." 

One of them gets as far as the door; they grant 
him this privilege because he has cataracts on his 
eyes and is used to finding his way about with a 
stick, even on fair-days. 

" If only I could see ! " he says. " Where are you 
bound?" 

To Laon, then to Charleville, then to Bonn, 
we tell him. Farewell! There is the park; the last 
house of the city lies behind us, the first woodland 
cottage is just ahead. In front of it stands a dis- 
trustful child, who watches us and then passion- 
ately takes refuge in the arms of his grandfather, 
who happens along just then. 

" You killed the Prussians, did n't you, grand- 
pa?" he cries. 

The old man hugs him, consoles him, says 
"Yes" again and again; then, taking advantage 
.... 255 ..» 



Five Nights, Five Dawns on the Marne 

of a moment when the urchin's face is hidden, he 
motions to us with his finger — hastily, lest his 
grandchild catch him in the act — that it is not 
true, that we killed them. 



May on Lake Asqiiam 



MAY ON LAKE ASQUAM 

I am stretched out in the middle of a great ring of 
mountains. When I get up onto my feet, I be- 
come their very pivot. I have put the sun on my 
left, as they taught me to do at school, and I am 
writing to you. The lake below me bears fragile 
islands on its surface, and pine logs, from the 
drifts broken up during the winter, wash va- 
grantly in its bays and coves. Humming-birds 
thrusting voraciously among the apple-blossoms, 
wound their swift bills on the hard wood and 
glance off again. To soothe the sore feet of the 
farm turkeys, — a degenerate race, — Mrs. Green 
is greasing the limbs of the tree where they come to 
roost. A thrush grazes me, a little breeze begins 
to stir. As when a bird alights by a dreaming poet 
and he is moved to see the very thought he was 
seeking within himself drop then, perfect — so a 
sweet and tender love, instead of stirring in my 
heart, lifts this page, fans me with its soft breath. 
In boat-houses hidden in the reeds the farmers are 
testing the motors of the boats which will be 
launched for their masters next month. Mrs. 
.... 259 ... 



May on Lake Asquam 

Green is beating a rose-colored puff for me, be- 
cause my bed ends under the window, and when 
I wake in the morning I see my sunny feet under 
the spread — and yet feel cold. In the depths of 
the creeks where the new-cut pines are floating, 
the lumbermen jump from one log to the next, 
whistling as they go. I envy them their balance; 
I feel overweighted with a lake and a sun on my 
left, and nothing on my right. 

Where am I? I am in a land which I instantly 
recognize to be enormous, because these wasps 
that are this second buzzing about my head are 
three times bigger than they are in Europe. I am 
in the middle of New Hampshire, which is having 
its first sight of the sky-blue uniform, and, sup- 
posing that I have chosen this color myself, im- 
agines me to be sensitive and generous. The 
Harvard Regiment is having a week of examina- 
tions, and I am taking a rest. 

The motor left Boston early on Monday, reach- 
ing the suburbs at the hour when the typewriters, 
perched on their high-heeled, pointed shoes, in 
their low-necked foulard dresses, and bent slant- 
wise to the wind, climb into the tramcars with- 
out touching the rail, anxious only for their hands; 
the stenographers following them rigidly erect, 
.... 260 ■••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

thinking only of their heads. On the door-steps 
Irish girls with brown braids looped over their 
ears passed on to us, through soft blue eyes, the 
holiest thoughts they had been pondering in the 
night. We were following the highway bordered 
with Washington elms, very old trees whose 
trunks had been repaired with the sort of cement 
of which they make statues in this country; and 
immortality — as sap was lacking — had already 
reached the topmost branches. Lakes that grew 
clearer and clearer the farther we went held the 
water of the richer and richer parts of Boston, and 
we came at last to the very round, very blue lake 
that supplies Beacon Street. 

At noon we were at Portsmouth, where I pre- 
sided at a meeting the children were holding on 
the beach to sell their pet animals, for the benefit 
of their French godchildren. There were at least 
a hundred of them, all grave, eager, or at least 
aquiescent, save Grace Henderson, who clung to 
her white calf and wept. They bought it of her 
quickly, and in pity gave it back to her; but her 
brother obliged her to sell it again, and so she had 
to struggle and surfer three times over. There 
were Cuban birds, that you bought with their 
cages; native birds that you bought so as to set 
.... 261 •••• 



May on Lake Asquani 

them free; turtles which sold badly, as they wore 
the initials of their first master carved on their 
backs; goats; and there were animals which were 
also immolated for the cause — sad dogs, who 
had no resistance left in them, and sold them- 
selves; a little elephant which clasped his mistress 
by a belt that gave, by a sleeve that tore, and so 
did not dare to take her by the pigtail. The gov- 
ernesses, to console their children, quickly bought 
these other animals, and took turns standing on a 
platform to read out letters from the godsons: 
"Venez chez moi, firai chez vous" wrote Jean 
Perrot, "et si je meurs je veux vous voir." Some 
professors who were there were amazed to dis- 
cover that all French children use rhythmic prose. 
Then came green forests cut by tumbling 
brooks, where little boys, who were fishing for 
trout with both hands, hailed us with a wink, as 
they did not dare to move or call out. Then came 
the country of the field-mice, where the owls have 
such fat haunches that they have to perch side- 
ways for fear of tumbling off their twigs head 
first. Then came Sandwich, where a Lithuanian 
was waving his national flag, protesting all by 
himself against conscription. Then came Lake 
Asquam, and this local hilltop where I have lain 
.... 262 •••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

stretched out ever since, at the foot of a slim 
giant birch, which has only one tuft of verdure at 
its top, and will fall if it puts out a single other 
leaf. 

My hostess is Mrs. Green, the farmer's wife, 
who wears her gray hair braided down her back, 
and a big striped shawl, and eyeglasses; but she 
twists the calves' tails, and fights with the rooster. 
When a word gets stuck in my fountain pen I 
shake it out into the lake from my steamer-chair. 
Sometimes, though, it is inside me that it hesi- 
tates, and then I have to get up myself, lean on my 
elbows, sometimes even stoop all the way over. 

Who am I with ? With two friends — ■ a forester 
and an Australian poet. The morning belongs to 
Carnegie, the forester. By six o'clock he has me 
up and off on a dash to his district, straight across 
the islands where every owner keeps a different 
scheme of hours, according as he likes to see his 
children get up early or late. Silent beasts are 
waking in woods that still have their Indian 
names; the muskrat is taking his bath, the blue 
heron flies from an isthmus to an island, from an 
island to an islet, flying ever towards that little 
round point of noon. We land in haste, to avoid an 
upset, — for a new-cut pine log is already sliding 
.... 263 •••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

down the toboggan to the lake, — and go to the 
sawmill by a path that was once covered with saw- 
dust, but that my forester has had tarred since he 
lost his gold chain. He teaches me the secret sign 
by which one may recognize the red pine, the white 
pine, and the black pine; he gathers together his 
group of woodcutters, who are going off to France, 
and forces me to denounce our biggest trees in 
French — the oak, the elm; I saw my favorite 
beeches with difficulty. In the short cuts we walk 
through the briars stiffly, as people who do not 
speak the same tongue always do, and not one of 
these noble gestures is lost, my dear, for the forest 
is full of lynxes. In the clearings he shows me 
the remains of the wood fires he has kindled 
since his childhood, and twenty years of embers 
still blacken his fingers. He is moved and sits 
down, my love, to dream . . . and suddenly four 
little woodchucks, my sweet, hurry timidly out 
of the ground; real little woodchucks, my heart. 
We catch them — they bite us, and try to get 
away — we pet them, my dear love. 

But the night belongs to Rogers, the Austra- 
lian. The whole world is dark, invisible; only one 
red point to be seen, Carnegie's cigar — he is 
noiselessly paddling on the lake. But miles away 
.... 264 •••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

the chosen tree that announces the moon sud- 
denly twinkles down its whole length. That is 
because a whole moon is coming. Evetything is 
radiant, everything shines. Rocks begin to show 
themselves, as white and polished as bleached 
bones. Far around the lake the reflection of the 
forest, just now cleft and jutting, becomes an even 
border. It is the hour when the Indians gave a 
name to all the things that surround us. The 
white mountains turn white, the yellow birches 
yellow, and blue, blue grow the owls. Every sepa- 
rate plane of the lake seems to lie on a different 
level, and the moon gnaws the water where it falls 
over the dams. A divine night, this, when the 
White Mountains are of silver and the birches of 
gold. At last the hour has come when I can find 
an epithet for my soul, and a name for my house. 
The bullfrog groans; the loon, black swan of the 
lake, utters cries, first piercing, then muffled, for 
he continually ducks his head under the water 
and pulls it out again. The true moon cautiously 
climbs farther and father from the false moon. . . . 
But Rogers insists on talking. He wants me to 
talk to him of Seeger, who is dead, of Blakely, 
who is dead — of all the American poets who 
were killed before the American war began. He 
.... 265 — • 



May on Lake Asquam 

persists in talking French, without allowing me 
to help him, and circles about the words he no 
longer knows: about the word "debonair," the 
word "ladder," the word "serenity." From my 
refuge in the very heart of the word I wait plac- 
idly for him, sometimes in the heart of a proper 
name, in the heart of Baudelaire — a stuffy place, 
his statue. Then he reads me his verses, which he 
wishes to adapt to Europe, because the Australian 
mouths are so different from our own. 

"July has frozen the rivers," he says, "and the 
useless bridges are collected in the barn." 

I shake my head; he understands, and corrects 
himself: — 

"Summer has frozen the rivers, and the 
bridges" . . . 

The loon sings on. The lake suddenly bursts 
into flame, for Carnegie is lighting a second cigar. 
Rogers grows emotional, takes my hand and cir- 
cles about a word which expresses both loons and 
friendships, a word which even we in France, alas, 

do not know. 

* 

* * 

When the storm breaks; when, by millions, the 
owners of the wooden houses bring their red- 
.... 266 •••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

striped tents in from the rain: when a flash of 
lightning allows you to see — through the isin- 
glass of the top of the car in front of you — the 
shadow of two gray heads; when the black bird 
with the red wings folds his wings; when the pro- 
German shuts his window and suddenly feels so 
lonely and beaten that he bursts into tears; when, 
in the public parks, the crowds swarm under the 
tents of the recruiting sergeants, and help them 
move their posters, and torpedoes, and mortars 
under shelter; when the mother astride the purple 
motor-cycle tries in vain to reach out a hand and 
feel the baby dozing in the side-car; when the 
golden stags, the dragons and the golden cows 
whirl madly on the clock-towers of the barns, but 
always in time; when a Hannan shoe lies on the 
deserted avenue; when a blast of wind lifts the 
page of the one-armed accountant, and he holds it 
down with the point of his pen, calling for help; 
when one hears nothing on the side-walks, on the 
sea, on the buildings, but the rain . . . then when 
a sunbeam comes down, and a sharp cloud cuts it, 
and it falls; when the rainbow shivers, its left on 
the solid city cement, its right on the sea; when 
you gather the sun into a corner of the sky, as if it 
were your one last match — and it finally burns; 
.... 267 •••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

when a victorious sunbeam, falling on the terrace 
beats by the fraction of an inch a rain-drop that 
has come from thousands of miles less far away; 
when the baby in the side-car gets the last drop of 
all, and begins to cry — then when the pond-lilies 
climb up to the level of the new pond that has 
formed about them; when the farmer in his rubber 
boots tramps out to empty his pitch cans and his 
maple syrup cans of their water; when a child, for 
no reason at all, wants to burn a joss-stick; when 
the traveller, at the turn of the Canon, gets down 
to pat his mule and all at once remounts quickly 
for the storm is rumbling again, and he wants to 
keep his saddle dry; when the rain begins to beat 
down once more, in a deluge, the very same rain, 
as you can plainly recognize by its drops: then I 
think of him, of Seeger, who loved storms, and I 
shudder. 

"How did Seeger die? ,, asks Rogers. 

In a month Rogers will be leaving for the war, 
and he loses no opportunity of informing himself 
how the poets, his colleagues, were killed. It 
would be very odd if two poets were killed in the 
same way, the same identical way; each one of 
these deaths is death that fate will deny him. He 
will not wander, like Rupert Brooke, repeating 
.... 268 •••■ 



May on Lake Asquam 

one Christian name after another, and dying at 
the first woman's name. He will not have him, as 
Dollero did, to write me three letters; the first with 
a splinter and his blood saying good-bye; the sec- 
ond with his nurse's pencil, hoping to see me; the 
last with the doctor's fountain pen, — confident, 
happy, unfinished. He will not drop dead like 
Hesslin, the German poet, on the back of a mysti- 
cal sergeant who rose slowly with his load, and 
bore it to the hospital without casting a back- 
ward look, He will need a whole grave to himself, 
since he is not to die like Blakely, whose poor re- 
mains fitted into a Palmer's biscuit box. It will 
not be at dark, as it was with Drouot, or at noon, 
as it was with Clermont. If Seeger died at dawn, 
there is no time left for him but night. Bitter 
night, running under the days like some infernal 
strawberry vine. Soft night, with its lake, its 
loons. Night on the Sydney steamers, when the 
world turns silent, and nothing stands in the way 
of a poet's thoughts but the mute strain of a ves- 
sel. Night near some French spring where you lie, 
scarcely aware of your wound, and nibble a leaf of 
water-cress. Somber night, in whose very center, 
sharp cut against the velvet dark, the sun sud- 
denly appears. Happy he who dies at night! 
.... 269 •••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

"How did Seeger die? Did you know him?" 
Rogers is astigmatic, wears heavy gold-rimmed 
spectacles with lenses of different pattern, and 
always asks you two questions at a time, Yes, I 
had seen him. Once it was in the Luxembourg, in 
summer; he was just coming into that unreal gar- 
den, with its world of fantastic and tender Pari- 
sians — those who felt themselves too heavy could 
buy little balloons at the gate. Another time it was 
at the house of a friend whom he had tried to find 
the two preceding evenings; on the first he left a 
couplet, on the second a sonnet. My friend allowed 
himself to be surprised in bed, the third day, and 
so did not get his poem. 

"Did he suffer? Have you seen his last verses?" 
For Rogers also collects the last poems of all the 
poets who have been killed. He even collects their 
last letters in prose, where sometimes two words 
clash into each other and rhyme — the same 
thing happens when a departing warrior is dress- 
ing in his apartment, with his friends standing 
about, — and makes them tremble. It may be a 
last letter written to an aunt between the two last 
poems, when, in spite of himself, he uses the poetic 
epithet (as the other does not come) — talks of 
"steeds," and "blades," and "meads," and feels 
.... 270 •••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

obliged to be somewhat ironic. Last poems where 
nearly all of them saw death as it was, in fact, to 
overtake them, Seeger like a mistress, longing for 
a rendezvous, Dollero like a storm with three 
stray birds, Blakely like a headless monster — 
and when only Brooke foresaw things all wrong. 
Poor Brooke who told us "Sije nieurs, dites vous 
que dans une terre etrangbre il y aura toujours un 
coin de terre anglaise. Une poussiere plus riche que 
la terre y sera contenue, un corps d y Angleterre lave 
par les rivieres anglaises, brMe par le soleil anglais" 
il un corps horizontal tendu sur la ligne de tous les 
corps anglais" and in the end died on a boat, and 
was thrown into the sea with a cannon ball to keep 
his shroud upright. So that, for all one's pity one 
is put on one's guard, and when one turns over 
his other poems one no longer believes exactly 
what they say; no longer believes that love is une 
rue ouverte ou se precipite ce qui jamais ne voient, 
un traitre qui livre au destin la citadelle du cceur, 
un enfant ttendu. One grows obstinate about it, 
insists on believing that love is a street, if you 
like, but a street with no outlet; a traitor perhaps, 
but in that case a friendly traitor; and sometimes 
one sees the charming fellow standing quite verti- 
cal, floating sadly in the air. 
.... 271 ••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

"How did Seeger die?" 

It is summer. Everything that prevents one 
from breathing in summer — his cap, his gas- 
mask — he throws off. He holds his cigar behind 
him, because of the smoke; the company thief 
steals it away from him, — thank heaven, for so 
his hands will not burn up after his death. Then 
he stretches himself, but without lifting his arms, 
crosswise. He has just one minute to live. There 
is your watch before you, with its second hand: 
one minute and he will be dead. In his pocket is 
the bottle of heliotrope perfume that he is to 
break as he falls. Now you have not even time, 
before he dies, to write that short sentence which 
he took for his motto, the one that he wrote at the 
head of every poem — about the poplars. If it is 
a shell, the cannon is being loaded. If it is a bul- 
let, the German soldier is tapping his charge and 
slipping it in. Seeger raises his head. The sky is 
very blue. A poplar, yes, a poplar is outlined on 
the horizon. Seeger climbs the firing step — a 
bird, yes, a . . . 

* * 

So my three days of rest have gone, and now it 
is noon. I think of you who wrote me every week 
.... 272 •••• 



May on Lake Asquam 

from Europe, a letter of variable mood — Even 
the color of the paper is inconstant, and each one, 
like the flash of a revolving lighthouse, throws 
a new region into high relief. Love is a restive 
horse, a saddled antelope, a faithful traitor. The 
sun is just above me now. I was writing, to spare 
my eyes, in the shadow of my head; there is no 
shadow left; adieu, Madame, I write the last word, 
I write your name, full in the sun. 



THE END 



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